We all go to bed. It is, in every sense, the great leveller. And in Bedbugs we get to see what a bed witnesses, in its silent, non-judgemental vigil on the ups and downs of humanity.
Actually, we don’t just see it. We’re part of it. The set of Bedbugs reaches out of the stage and envelops the audience, who are lounging on mattresses, rugs, pouffes, cushions and lilos. I myself reclined on a chaise longue that I have previously watched as a prop in at least eight other productions, so it was nice finally to get to know it personally. I felt like I really had a relationship with it.
And that’s what this play is all about: the power of the bed over human relationships.
Through a series of twinkling vignettes it takes us from minimum-wage workers at Benson’s Beds, to couples bickering before dropping into their pillows; from a bride-to-be in a hotel room who can’t pluck up the courage to call off her marriage, to a pair of students who wake up with a third person in their bed and can’t remember who they are or how they got there; from an actual bedbug (topically French of course) blowing kisses to the audience, to the emotional heart of the whole show: a meeting between a nervous woman and a prostitute, both yearning for a connection through the bed that will be forever denied them.
Apparently tonight the tech was in meltdown. There should have been projections and sound cues that never materialised. But the show was so mesmeric, you couldn’t tell there was anything amiss. Coco Cottam’s smart and tender script shifts from satire to pathos and from absurdity to sitcom like a revolving crystal, refracting different colours as it rotates. It’s at times hilarious, and at others moving. The dialogue sounds somehow completely normal and believable, yet simultaneously heightened and just artificial enough to be theatrical. It’s a magical balancing act of creativity.
And in the background, ever-present, bringing us back to our most basic urges – to sleep, to procreate, to share our innermost thoughts – is the bed. At the end of the play it is left alone on the stage, a mute star in its own drama, the fat lady with a silent song. And the audience quietly gazes at it with a kind of renewed understanding and appreciation, like a complex poem that’s just been explained.
The quality of acting in Bedbugs is uniformly outstanding, and it’s remarkable that the majority of performers in the eight-strong cast are first-timers on the Oxford stage. It was a conscious choice from Peach Productions to seek fresh talent, and they found it in abundance. Elise Busset and Joe Rachman, as the Benson’s Beds 'will-they-won’t-they' minimum-wagers, hold the narrative together with a sequence of scenes threaded through the play. But in truth, everyone shines.
As in Cottam’s previous play Wishbone, there is a conscious and almost wilful determination to eschew conventional plot in Bedbugs. That’s fair enough. This play isn’t about what happens next, but about delving into what happens now; taking a moment in time, and spinning it into an iconic instant, hinting at tendrils of plot stretching forwards and backwards in time. As a theatrical experience, would it benefit from a little more sense of structure? Of building to some sort of climax? Perhaps. But that’s for another show. For now, as the bed so irresistibly invites, I suggest you just lie back, and enjoy.