Game

by Mike Bartlett

seen at the Almeida Theatre 17 March 2015

This play, if nothing else, shows the astonishing versatility of Mike Bartlett's dramatic imagination. Where 'King Charles III' reinvented the Shakespearean history play to interrogate a constitutional crisis in the near future, with its characters rendered surprisingly serious by their blank verse utterances, 'Game' lasts barely an hour and pitches the audience collusively into the murky world of video games and voyeurism.

The Almeida has been disconcertingly reconfigured so that the audience is placed in four 'zones', renamed within the context of the play as 'hides', which is indeed what they are. On being shown to one's zone, each member of the audience is given headphones, and video screens above the lowered blinds which conceal the stage display messages in a clunky font urging that the equipment be checked; a sound test ensues before the Game begins. The hides are claustrophobic, hidden from one another, and invisible to anyone on stage. The seat cushions and walls are decorated with army camouflage fatigue designs.

It is only when the Game begins that blinds are raised to give a view of a bland living space which Carly and Ashley (Jody McNee and Mike Noble, both excellent) are investigating apparently as young home-buyers. But the fact that their speech is most clearly heard in the headphones, and that the video screens provide alternative views of the space, means that one is constantly distracted from conventional attention to a stage. This is compounded when one of the screens switches to showing important activity in one or another of the hides, as a 'warden' (Kevin Harvey, at first a monosyllabic cipher, but eventually involved and conflicted), indistinguishable from a fairground operator, introduces various people to take part in the Game. The fact that they too are wearing headphones, and that their actions take place in the various audience spaces, make the audience themselves uneasily complicit; the hour begins to seem unusually long.

I have not explicitly described the game, but Carly and Ashley - and later their son Liam (seven or eight years pass in the hour) - are paying a high price to inhabit their home. Yet one must piece together the strains and the couple's reservations from small hints, and from Liam's frightened and frightening withdrawal into a cardboard box. Our attention to this dilemma is constantly interrupted by the vignettes taking place in the hides. These are not developed (each group of game players appears only once) but they may taken as typical participants in any sort of game involving targets. David the 'warden' gradually, inevitably, becomes involved, so that his story becomes of interest to the audience too. The story of the marketing of the Game itself also has some relevance.

Thus a great many strands are jostling for attention in this short piece, together with appreciation for the technical sophistication of the environment (designer Miriam Buether) and direction (Sacha Wares). Even the relations of meanings between the words 'game' and 'play' contribute to the increasing sense of unease. Although some dramatic expectations are confounded - such as a close investigation of Carla and Ashley, or of David the 'warden', for that matter - 'Game' as a whole is provocative and disturbing.