St Johns College Auditorium, Wednesday 18th November – Saturday 21st November, 8p.m.

“if you give an audience enough screaming, swearing, drugs and sex, with perhaps a fake body part thrown in, you’re bound to achieve some sort of breakthrough.” Review by Annabel James ★★★★★

Bad Jazz ★★★★★

Review by Annabel James

Is the purpose of theatre to ‘fuck over people’s minds’? The director of the play-within-a-play in Bad Jazz thinks so, and the production as a whole seems intent on achieving this. The St. John’s Mummers’ take on Robert Farquhar’s explicit satire of the theatre industry certainly provides shock and surprise, but whether one’s mind is ever truly fucked with is uncertain. The difficulty seems to stem from the premise of the script: if you give an audience enough screaming, swearing, drugs and sex, with perhaps a fake body part thrown in, you’re bound to achieve some sort of breakthrough. In fact, as with many a piece of sensation art, such shock tactics send barriers shooting up from the beginning: the audience knows it’s in for a gruelling and so arms are crossed, an expression of studied half-interest is adopted, and any mental vulnerability is shut off from the reach of the performance.

Having said that, Phil Bartlett’s fine direction shapes moments of great sympathetic appeal in this play, delivered by a cast of outstanding skill. Rachel Dedman gives a performance of incrementally intensified anguish as Natasha, the main actress of the meta-play, and Nick Mulligan as her co-star, Danny, matches her in vocal modulation and emotional intensity. Danny’s description of cheating on Natasha, once the two actors have started sleeping together off-stage as well as on, was quite astounding. It was delivered with the minimum of gesticulation, mostly while seated in a central chair, which heightened the import of his words to the extent that light streaming in through bedroom windows became an image of religious majesty. Their self-consciously kooky director, Gavin, is played by Matthew Thomlinson in a manner almost disconcertingly deadpan; and Adam Trepczynski uses excellent physical characterisation in his role as Ewan, the wannabe playwright whom Gavin exploits for his own ends. All the actors possessed the singularity of commitment necessary to engage with a play described by its own publicity as ‘not for the faint-hearted’.

As the division between the characters’ lives on- and off-stage starts to dissolve, metatheatrical effects abound and the mockery of theatrical realism becomes explicit. The script offers no reconciliation between such self-parodying and the strained emotional experiences of the characters, but the absurdity of this contradiction proved the source of much of the performance’s humour. It was impossible not to laugh, for example when Sebastian Lennox as Natasha’s ex-boyfriend, Ben, made a truly reformed re-entrance at the play’s conclusion. All in all, a text with misguided strategies to affect the minds of its audience is elevated by the calibre of this cast and its director. No, I don’t think many of those who attended will have experienced a gut wrenching shift in philosophical outlook. But we were surprised, humoured, and provoked by contradiction: this play certainly entertained.