I guess the warning signs were there from the start.
In his programme notes (two full pages of tight text headlined THE HISTORY OF THE PLAY) Noah Wild tells us that ‘everyone’ describes his production differently. Some say it’s about a confused boy, others that it’s about eating disorders, coming of age, masculinity or an exploration of life writing… as if all of these interpretations and more are to be found in the multifaceted work that is I Will Delete This Story. He says these different interpretations reveal as much about the watcher as the writer. The truth is not so universal: it’s about a confused boy who writes poetry and comes of age as a man while his sister has an eating disorder.
Wild also tells us that he sensed the material would work ‘like a teenage version of Sarah Kane’. OK. Stop. First of all, writing about vaguely Kane-like subject matter does not make you a ‘version’ of her. Kane’s genius lies not just in her material, but in her writing and her dramatic presentation. Her plays are visceral, challenging, surreal, brutal and cathartic. I Will Delete This Story is none of the above. Its narrative movement over the nearly two-hour running time is minimal, and its central character spends most of the play shuffling awkwardly around the stage, saying ‘I dunno’ whenever the possibility of a dramatic encounter raises its head.
I know there's a tradition in Oxford of not writing bad reviews. Understandably, people don't want to upset their friends or dissuade someone from a chosen career path. I take a different view. I respect creative people enough to tell them the truth as I see it. They deserve that honesty. And I believe it's more helpful for them to hear it now than to get cocooned in false praise before suddenly encountering hard reality outside the university. I don't know Noah Wild, but I think he's got a lot of talent, and he may well be eyeing a career in theatre. I owe it to him to say what I truly think, and he may find it useful. He certainly should not be dissuaded.
I saw another student-written play this week that didn’t come off: Black Blood. But I decided not to review it as it didn’t seem fair. There was no suggestion with Black Blood that its writer, director and cast had pretensions beyond just having a go, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But Sunday Productions clearly see a future for themselves beyond one or two productions. This is their third show. The programme tells us that the ‘Sunday’ in their name ‘encapsulates the fun, relaxed and accessible approach to making theatre we aim to achieve’. It’s a fine aim, but they must understand that they haven’t achieved it with this play. I listened to other audience members during the interval and on the way out. They couldn’t follow the action, couldn’t figure out why the narrative skipped backwards and forwards in time repeatedly, and also agreed that the best bit was a scene when the characters tipped a load of rubbish onto the stage. They were right: that was the only part of the play that had any dramatic style to it.
There was one other potentially powerful moment, when Emma tells Sam that she has an eating disorder. But its handling actually strangled any possibility of dramatic impact. It was anti-theatrical. (And while it's just about possible that a father would respond to the news by saying ‘Oh thanks for telling me’, because he doesn’t know what an eating disorder is, it's ludicrous that nobody would find this parental response in any way shocking.)
So. A few practical points:
1. If your central character is a withdrawn, mumbly, 17/18-year-old boy who won’t look anyone in the eye, then you need to find a way of presenting him that makes the audience actually curious about him. If he reveals nothing about himself most of the time then the viewers cannot communicate with the play, never mind him.
2. Editing. If you are both writing and directing a play, and you’re relatively new to it, you must get someone you trust to look honestly at what you’ve written, and suggest cuts. Otherwise you will get scenes that drag on endlessly.
3. Make the sound work. It’s not difficult. Tonight most of the music cues kept flicking on and off like a baby playing with the mute button on the remote control.
4. Make climactic moments believable. For example, in one confrontation scene Sam tries to persuade Emma that he loves her by showing her evidence in his poetry. He reads out one verse, and – too late – realises that it refers to a blonde, and Emma is brunette. Are we seriously expected to believe that he wouldn’t know what was in his own poems?
5. Never, ever have a character produce an enormous pile of anything and then start to go through it one piece at a time. Tonight Sam got a collection of about a hundred photos out of a jiffy bag and proceeded to distribute them around the floor one after another. We the audience could see from the thickness of the wad how long it was going to take, and we just had to sit there and wait while he got on with it. (I thought that would be the end of the play, but no, there was even more after that.)
6. Finally, if you’re going to cover your set with hand-written statements like ‘What is there left to dream?’ and ‘Life is pointless’, then you need at some stage to give the audience a clue as to whether these are meant to be deep questions or just pretentious twaddle.
I Will Delete This Story was not without some merit. Kay Kassanda and Marianne Nossair brought the parts of Zara and Emma to life with bright, outgoing performances. But William Fitzgerald as Sam was just not delivering this evening. To be fair, he was coughing a lot, so he may not have been entirely well.
The problem however was the play itself. It should not have got to this stage. In truth, it concerned me to see obvious talent being squandered, and grandiose claims being made in the programme that weren’t backed up by reality.
I hope the incredibly talented inhabitants of the Oxford drama scene (and there are many of them) can distinguish between supportive criticism and just being nice to each other, because aspiring, gifted writers like Noah Wild really need honest feedback early in the stages of a creative endeavour. With a guiding, critical friend this could have been wonderful. But as it is, I would delete this production.