When I first looked at the programme for The Players I was a trifle sceptical. "We are a theatre collective and artistic community", it claims, and "We strive to remodel the way that drama is traditionally structured." Really? Give me a break, I thought. This is, after all, Splinters Productions' first ever show. How many times have I read overblown statements like that, only to find they're so much hot air?
But then I looked closer. And I realised that this was that one in a hundred cases where it's all actually true.
Co-creators Sasha Ranawake and Camille Branch really did write two different versions of their scenario, and then compile and debate them over the summer. They really did get four separate editors to expand, enhance and deepen their ideas. They really did invite a cavalcade of artists, poets and essayists to respond creatively to their script, and they've gathered all this ancillary work together in a gorgeous, thought-provoking, collective-based magazine. And they really are sending all the profits to an international aid organisation, Medical Aid for Palestinians, that is neither prejudiced nor protest-based, but focused entirely on the relief of human suffering.
OK, so their hearts are in the right place, and they've created an artistic community. But have they truly "remodelled the way that drama is traditionally structured"?
I think they might have.
The Players is set entirely backstage at an excruciatingly bad Oxford student production of Romeo and Juliet. The hopelessly floundering director Nadia can't hold her fractious cast together, and her awkward hectoring only makes them worse. Juliet/Arya forgets her lines during the balcony scene. Romeo/Seb is on the verge of coming out as gay, but doesn't have the nerve. And Tybalt/Marcus is just about the most annoying Etonian who ever played the Biscuit Game.
What gradually emerges is that there are two dramas going on here: the one the imaginary audience sees, and the one we see. While they watch Romeo and Juliet, we watch young people grapple with infatuation, self-confidence, parental expectations and explosive arguments. In a way, Romeo and Juliet is playing out on both sides of the curtain. But the inverted vantage point of this show gives us a glimpse of reality. It's messy and painful, and it's as full of performance as any Shakespearean tragedy.
The Players isn't the first backstage drama. Michael Frayn's Noises Off is set partly backstage at a farce, and it finds seat-wettingly great comedy in the contrast between the apparently professional performances and the backstage shenanigans. But The Players is doing something different. The backstage setting is so natural that it feels real. In the opening scene, Seb/Romeo (George Robson) and Milo/Benvolio (Alfred Hennel Cole) whisper together so quietly that we can hardly catch a word - and this is deliberate. We're not being performed to in the traditional sense. Instead, we're spying on a convincing approximation of the camaraderie, nervousness and pandemonium that really goes on behind the scenes of a student play. At one point, everyone on stage is talking at once. There's no way we can follow all the conversations. But the effect is both convincingly natural and fascinatingly artificial. To put it another way, it does indeed remodel the way that drama is traditionally structured.
The staging is simple but effective: when the cast members are performing their roles in Romeo and Juliet, they go behind a curtain, and we can make out their silhouettes along with a couple of stage lights. We can also hear their voices in the background, and even sometimes the hubbub of their audience. And it does indeed look like the worst production of Romeo and Juliet imaginable. During the scene in which Ariya/Juliet (Leya Carter) forgets her lines, everything goes quiet on our side of the curtain as the students watch in horror, unable to help.
There are elements which tug at the credibility of the naturalism the Splinters team have worked so hard to create. Would Oxford students really ever create so crassly basic a production? Would a director so familiar with the play not realise instantly that an actor who walks out in Act Three doesn't actually have any more lines to speak? These are details that expose the artifice of the concept, but rather than weakening the overall show, they help give it its own shape and story. Because it has one.
The Players isn't only a slice of student life. Everyone changes between start and end. A plot emerges from the chaos, and it reframes the passions of Shakespeare's lovers to the more pressing, contemporary concerns of young people today. And the final phone call between Seb and his mother, who didn't bother to stay for the whole performance because Daddy had a conference call, is as tragic and moving as anything on the other side of the curtain.
So Ranawake and Branch were true to their word. Their creative process pulls traditional dramatic structure to pieces, and rebuilds it with new tools. Their Romeo and Juliet may be the most unoriginal production ever mounted. But The Players stands as one of the most original productions of the year. Go hence, and have more talk of these glad things.