Theatre Review

A World Premiere

Actability Theatre Company

I am not an I

Written and directed by Stephen M. Hunt

Assistant director Peter-Frank Dewulf

Rosemary Branch Theatre

9 - 28 September, 2008

Couzens

A review by Tim Jeeves for EXTRA! EXTRA!

Going solely on the title, one could be mistaken for assuming that this play by writer Stephen M Hunt is an existential, Zen-inspired update of the seventies cult TV series The Prisoner.

It’s not. And if that’s what you’re after you’re probably better off looking elsewhere.

If however, you’re after the world premiere of an otherworldly Godotesque limbo, one that slowly crystallises into a looping narrative suggestive of the paintings of M. C. Escher, then head down to the Rosemary Branch before the play finishes at the end of the month. You won’t be disappointed.

With characters including a Mephistophelian know-it-all, a bolshie American tourist, an up-tight academic and his (soon to be ex) girlfriend with a penchant for sex in police cells, the first half is deliciously disorientating, with two different worlds very subtly linked together. What we see after the interval makes everything much more intelligible with some clever narrative twists.

Hildegard Neil (of Charlton Heston’s Antony and Cleopatra fame) convincingly plays the bumbling but determined character of the American tourist lost in purgatory, but the standout performance comes from Ben Onwukwe with a brilliant demonstration of his playing range and ability to take on a wide variety of characters in rapid succession.

The rest of the cast are all very competent, though there is a tendency for the action to degenerate at times into a rather painful shouting match which leaves an audience wishing that alternative, and more controlled, ways of showing the peaks in the emotional story could have been explored.

Which is a shame, because the distancing of the audience that such clamour forces diminishes the power of Hunt’s writing and obscures some of the myriad interpretations that can be laid on top of this whirl of identities and stories within stories.

Just like the Escher staircase that plays such a central role in the narrative form of the play, a number of possibilities as to what the play could be a metaphor for never quite coalesce into a single meaning – perhaps it is about female identity, or perhaps it is about the flexibility of self-perception in a broader sense or maybe it’s a lesson in the teachings of Zen. I suspect that it is all three – and probably a great deal more besides – and the mental exercise of exploring all these possibilities is one of the greatest attractions of the play.

It might have been better if the narrative had remained similarly indeterminable; after enjoying the bewilderment that came with trying to place the action into a cogent form in the first half it was somewhat disappointing to have things tidily explained in the second. Employing users of the mental health system to explain away the previous contradictions has hints of “And then they woke up and it was all a dream” about it – especially when the episodes of mental illness that we are shown lack the subtlety of representation that such topics demand.

Nevertheless, this quibble and the excessive shouting aside, I am Not an I is a very clever look at what it means to be an individual (or not). This hour and a half in the Rosemary Branch provides a very healthy workout on the intellectual treadmill.

£13.00 (£9.00 concessions)

Box Office: 020 7704 6665

www.rosemarybranch.co.uk

Home