Mating Rituals of the Urban Duck, by Daniel James, is showing at the Burton Taylor as part of the OUDS New Writing Festival. It is, in essence, a fairly light comedy about first love. There are four characters, the traditional two guys and two girls, and the play covers a period of ten years. The play is performed backwards – Memento style – with each scene taking place some time before the last. There is an explanatory note to this effect in the programme.

The play begins with couple Jess (Emma Stephany) and Sam (Simon Demetriou) preparing to go out to a book launch. They are obviously having Problems, Sam making some implausible excuse to slope off to some other engagement. This prior engagement, it is eventually revealed, is with Naomi (Katie-Anne Berk), an old girlfriend, currently involved with Jess’ brother Oli (Andrew Feld). As the play unfolds, the full history of these four characters is revealed. These four characters are well written and well performed, distinctive and strongly characterised.

Although light-hearted, the play is rather ambitious; the events it chronicles unfold (backwards) over the course of ten years, with the characters regressing from age 27 to age 17. Here the piece may overstretch itself a little. The scenes seem a little too spread out, and the gaps leave a lot of questions unanswered (when does Sam go to Oxford? When does Oli become a novelist?). Similarly, although the characters are well drawn in general, they don’t really change that much over the ten years the play covers; although they go from tee-shirts to tuxedos, the characters still basically talk the same and act the same at seventeen and twenty-seven. Although events ostensibly take place over the course of ten years, they often feel more like they take place over ten months.

According to the writer’s notes, this is a play about the lies we tell when we are in love. According to the director’s notes, it is a coming of age story. I am not entirely sure I agree with either of them. I did not come away from the play feeling that deceit was a particularly strong theme, or that the characters had really been through any kind of rite of passage. The strength of the play is that it’s an entertaining story about engaging characters. It is a well written play, with some strong scenes, decent characters and nice dialogue. It won’t change your life, but it doesn’t claim that it will (indeed, the writer’s notes explicitly say that it won’t).
This is a new play, by a new writer, and as such is a reasonably strong debut. It is not without its flaws, but it is essentially an enjoyable evening’s entertainment, and it doesn’t really pretend to be anything else.

Daniel Hemmens, 22.02.05