REVIEW: If This Isn’t Eden Then Where the Hell Am I? at White Bear Theatre 18 - 29 July 2023

‘some cracking dialogue’ ★★★

When does self-referential become self-indulgent? Emily Foxton’s meta-comedy treads dangerously close to that boundary. It’s saved by committed performances (particularly Oscar Dobbins, playing a bit-of-rough working-class actor called Oscar, and injecting some menace and a lot of energy into the proceedings) and a bunch of good lines. One of the good lines is spoken by The Director: “You feel like you’re actors playing actors”. And of course they are. At the mercy of a distant playwright’s re-writes, the characters try to invest in a not terribly exciting play about brothers in an undefined state in the USA. They vie to be interesting, to invite development by the playwright, to avoid being written out. One of the actors stabs himself with a pen in a highly symbolic way. The play revels in that sort of meta-jokelet.

Emily Foxton can very evidently write well. She has assembled a cast of recently graduated Italia Conti students to animate her ideas, and they give it a jolly good go. But Pirandello wrote this script a hundred years ago, and Six Characters in Search of an Author has the virtue of originality. Ms. Foxton is coming in at the tail-end of a lot of existential meta-fictions, and none of them say much that is different – ohgodwereallcontrolledbyanunknownforcethatmakesusdostuffandsometimeskillsus. And that’s, like, a metaphor for human existence. Man.

The company give it their best shots, there is some cracking dialogue, the staging is effective. It would be nice to see this talent and this energy in the service of a more compelling subject.

If This Isn’t Eden Then Where the Hell Am I? by Emily Foxton

White Bear Theatre 18 - 29 July 2023

Box Office https://www.whitebeartheatre.co.uk/whatson/If-this-isn%E2%80%99t-Eden-then-where-the-Hell-am-I%3F

Reviewed by Chris Lilly