2019 Directors' Festival 3 and 4

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre on 8 August 2019

The Orange Tree Theatre, in partnership with St Mary's University Twickenham, is presenting four short plays directed by graduates of the MA program developed by the two institutions, in the third year of their partnership.

3. The Mikvah Project by Josh Azouz directed by Georgia Green

Avi (Robert Neumark Jones), a 35-year-old married man, and Eitan (Dylan Mason), a 17-year-old schoolboy, use the same mikvah (a Jewish ritual bath). Avi, devout, and hoping for a child, performs the ritual ablutions in aid of spiritual purity, while Eitan, whatever his initial motivation, soon develops a crush on the older man.  In their early conversations Avi is both amused and bemused by the boy's conversational style. Then when Eitan's attentions are unmistakeable he is at first appalled then gradually attracted himself. Somehow he finds himself deceiving his wife in order to spend a holiday weekend with Eitan (funded by money-gifts saved from the latter's bar mitzvah); but the birth of a son causes him to retreat, leaving the dejeced Eitan to grow out of this particular passion.

This is obviously a complex subject to deal with in only 75 minutes, and with only two actors to carry the story. In particular the absence of Avi's wife Leah from the stage - the interaction of husband and wife is only described by Avi - deprives us of another, and critical, view of the events; and in realistic terms we might wonder how easy it would be for a teenager in a presumably close community (even with personal funds at his disposal) to arrange a weekend away in Alicante. Despite these caveats, the play addresses many pertinent issues about unexpected passion and its disturbance of family and social loyalty.

Much of the action takes place at the mikvah, a submerged pool in the centre of the stage, perforce present even if we are temporarily at Avi's house, and doubling as the beach of the clandestine holiday. The mixture of community solidarity and personal detachment is very well conveyed in scenes where Avi talks from the position of the adult mentor of a puzzling teenager, irritated by his jargon, conventionally certain that a 'phase' must be endured and tamed. The intrusion of physical desire and attraction in a sacred space upsets and confuses the older man, and neatly represents the wider threat to his self-image. In the meantime Eitan appears to be only going through the motions of piety, in the meantime being just as interested in exploring nightclubs and the secular world.

Robert Neumark Jones gave a fine portrayal of an articulate, good-humoured and sensitive man, coming to terms with the daily routines of married life somewhat fraught by the difficulties Avi and Leah have in conceiving a child, and temporarily knocked off balance by the attentions of a male lover. Dylan Mason's Eitan showed the determination which sexual attraction can impose, especially perhaps on a youngster, though he did not quite catch the ardent passion of adolescence nor radiate its fateful charm. Full marks to the director and her team for devising the play in the already confined space of the Orange Tree's acting area with the added limitation of having a pool in the middle of it.

4. Eight Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography by Declan Greene directed by Gianluca Lello

 Amid a collection of voices bemoaning unattractiveness or protesting unfamiliarity with the on-line dating scene, a Man (Matthew Douglas) and a Woman (Cate Hamer) emerge to reveal one particular story. They are not beautiful young people, so naturally when they finally meet each is disappointed in the physical attractiveness of the other. Prior to their meeting we are shown something of the background of each. The Man relies on pornography for his sexual enjoyment, and is sacked and disgraced after having loaded the eponymous tranche of pornography onto his work laptop. The Woman lives in an almost paranoid welter of debt, relying on buying sprees and the studious refusal to pay attention to calls from debt servicing companies. She has two children, and a husband who is in an asylum. The Man comes to live in the Woman's flat, but there is little conversation, let alone comprehension, between them, and ultimately, after a burglary engineered by the released husband, he flees. The occasional moments of tenderness release fantasies of a fulfilled and happy life, but they never translate into reality.

It's a grimly comic look at frustrated lives, made tolerable to watch by the sympathetic portrayals by the two actors. Though the Man's misogyny and the Woman's financial recklessness are hardly in doubt, their images of themselves at the centre of their own stories include redeeming characteristics - true no doubt of all our self-presentations - and it is not adequate simply to dismiss them out of hand. Their grappling with the outside world may be hampered by all sorts of weakness and delusion, but if the Man, in his final desertion, is implicitly condemned, the Woman is left with a fragile dignity: 'Don't!' she demands of us in the closing lines, 'Don't laugh at me!'.

It's tricky to bring off the presentation of basically unsympathetic characters, especially when an audience may be all too ready to pre-judge the entanglement with social media and the level of self-delusion involved. But the two actors manage this skilfully; we may be appalled at sentiments expressed and deeds recounted, but the gaucheness of their initial encounter is excruciatingly entertaining, and the brief moments of outreach, even if insubstantial, reveal a blighted potential which seem to transform even the faces of the usually self-obsessed Man and Woman.

The staging, extremely straightforward and dependent mainly on switches of lighting to signify location and mood, makes it easy to pay attention to either character as required, while at the same time gesturing to the frenetic cycle of bars and dating sites lying behind this particular story.

To summarise, this year's Directors' Festival has revealed more excellent new talent and is a worthy successor to its predecessors.