OFS Studio

Tuesday 23rd – Saturday 27th February, 7.30p.m.

“A play about tedium, then, that finds it hard not to veer on the tedious. I won’t say Yawn has no inner resources – it’s frequently funny, stylishly staged, and mostly well-acted – but behind the hot air and the encyclopaedic research, I don’t know how much heart, or point, this sparky but perhaps a little shallow script contains.” Richard O’Brien ★★★★★

“The problem is that a clever concept (and randomly inserted poo references) can only stretch so far.” Madeline Wright ★★★★★

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Yawn ★★★★★

Review by Richard O’Brien

‘Ever to confess you’re bored means you have no Inner Resources,’ writes John Berryman in Dream Song 14. I wonder what he would have made of Oliver Rowse’s Yawn, a play so dependent on the concept of boredom for its very existence that it occasionally becomes a victim of its own success. The story is simple: Edward Fish (Tom Palmer) prepares for supper with his wife’s old school friend by regaling her with a series of boring anecdotes and soapbox theorising about planes, Darwin and the Munster Anabaptists, all delivered with great panache, until she leaves the room and the lights go down. By the second act, the school friend has arrived and Edward proceeds to regale her with the exact same pre-fabricated speeches, successfully at first, before teetering on the verge of a mental breakdown. It’s quite a handy device, if you missed anything the first time round. The writing is hard to criticise when its main point is its sheer pointlessness, but other than a strong subtext of violence in the Darwin monologue it’s easy to imagine each topic of conversation replaced with effectively anything else. Constantly careening towards the next aphorism, Rowse stakes out an odd middle ground between Fight Club and Alan Bennett, and the social observation works far better than the sloganeering; calling Darwin a war criminal comes about a year too late for bicentenary iconoclasm, and I’m not sure if this highly-referential railing is more Patrick Marber, or Nathan Barley. Ed Pearce as Constance, the suffering wife, has the least to say but is by far the most attractive character – most of her short, direct lines are a welcome counterpoint to Edward’s bluster, and also summarise quite neatly what the audience is thinking; namely, why is this man still talking? Spending most of the first act static while Palmer uses the space so thoroughly I hope he at least had the decency to buy it dinner, her reactions are natural, pithy and amusing, even if I wasn’t sure what exactly brought the couple together in the first place. Lindsay Dukes as Rachel made a refreshing change, treating Edward’s flights of fancy as attractive novelties even as we recognise them as tedious repetitions. By the time his rhetoric becomes fractured and frantic and she finds herself trapped against the sleek kitchen table (the design, I should add, is excellent), it was hard to know what else she could do in the face of this tirade; I half expected some kind of cathartic mass stabbing but instead, there was no real resolution for this model of a charmless man. A play about tedium, then, that finds it hard not to veer on the tedious. I won’t say Yawn has no inner resources – it’s frequently funny, stylishly staged, and mostly well-acted – but behind the hot air and the encyclopaedic research, I don’t know how much heart, or point, this sparky but perhaps a little shallow script contains.

Yawn ★★★★★

Review by Madeline Wright

Yawn is boring. I’m just going to get that one out there now. But then, of course, it’s meant to be boring, as it’s a play on a loop about the monumentally tedious Edward Fish. We’re invited into his house, witness his weird relationship with his wife, and are forced to listen to his endless monologues as he prepares for the arrival of his dinner guest, who he is going to then – you guessed it – bore.

As a concept, it’s a nice one; after all, who hasn’t ever been bored and wriggly in the theatre? The structure is very clever and the writing, above all, is original and snappy with flashes of unexpected and unexplained brilliance (I particularly liked the recurring theme of poo. I’ve no idea what it was about, but I liked it.)

The problem is that a clever concept (and randomly inserted poo references) can only stretch so far. I may have been very impressed with the idea, but I couldn’t help being disappointed with the actual execution. In fact, I might go so far as to say that I lost interest. In a bad way. Look, I acknowledge that theatre which plays with the audience’s sense of boredom is GOING to be tedious, but there’s got to be something more than that – there just wasn’t enough going on between Edward’s rambling set-pieces to hold the attention, and I frequently found myself concentrating on the uncomfortable seat rather than the stage.

Which is a shame, as the set was nicely quirky (kitchen counter, tables and chairs, drinks cupboard complete with brimming bottles of vodka) and the acting was fantastic – particular credit should go to the excellent Ed Pearce as the long-suffering Constance Fish, complete with unstudied and lifelike nervousness which acted as a successful foil to Tom Palmer’s blustery and popping-eyed Edward.

Overall, there’s a lot to praise in Yawn, and I commend the scope and imagination of this production, as well as the quirky set and brilliant acting. But damn, those theatre seats are uncomfortable. And you’re going to be horribly aware of it. When it comes down to it, you’ve basically got to decide: is the cleverness of this concept worth a really, really sore arse?