We meet Emma and James, the characters in Crazy Child Production’s remarkable new play Dreams, at a highly recognisable point in their lives. Undergraduates at the same uni, they are both fumbling towards adulthood, asking questions as sprawling and hopeful as the piece’s title.
Emma (Rachel Wadie) is a shrewd, guarded English student with an anxiety that bubbles up as moral perfectionism. She fears hurting someone so much that it seems safer just to keep her distance.
Will Hamp’s James, by contrast, is an easygoing chemistry student, smiling mildly in a cable knit sweater. James sees love and his ability to give it as proof of his worth. To him, Emma holds the key to his entire sense of purpose. The finer details of her personality are less important than what she symbolises.
As Emma, Wadie delivers a mesmerisingly layered performance, brash and acerbic one moment, waifish and hollow-eyed the next. You can feel the thrumming anxiety beneath Emma’s quick retorts. When she says she wishes for love to be a sort of overwhelming force, removing the endless responsibility of choice, you can understand why. Kamp, meanwhile has a naturalistic ease and believability that keeps his character from fading into the background.
The duo meet at an underwhelming student party, they go on a coffee shop date, and they kiss under the stars. Both want their love to be a classic Boy-Meets-Girl story, but both boy and girl are looking for an absolutely foundational level of assurance, one that this paint-by-numbers starter relationship is woefully unequipped to provide them with. And while the masterful writing lets the audience realise this early on, our poor protagonists are left to muddle on in the dark, trying to do what they think might be right.
In its witty, easy dialogue and poignant, wry twist on a romcom, the play shares some pleasures with Constellations by Nick Payne. But the piece of media it reminded me most of is not another play but a film, 500 Days of Summer, a film with the dressings of a romcom that tells the story of a failed relationship between a fresh-faced architect and hopeless romantic Tom, and his charming, funny, talented colleague Summer, who just wants to be friends with benefits. Summer tells Tom this from the start, but when he (and we, the audience) fall for her, there’s this expectation that she will fall too. The amount of vitriol I’ve heard about this character over the past decade could fill a page.
When I saw Dreams, I couldn’t help but imagine that both Emma and James had seen the film growing up, too, internalising its message and the public reactions to it. For James, it’s that the hero gets the girl, and she is both proof of and a reward for his wonderfulness (at the end of the film, Tom meets a new girl called Autumn, happy ending implied, no lessons learned). Be a prince, and you’ll get a princess. And for Emma, it’s that a girl who can’t conform to the Hollywood happy ending is worse than lonely; she’s actively villainous. And, as is almost a rite of passage for young women, she finds herself in the trap of girlfriend-as-a-performance, the classic ‘cool girl’ conundrum that floated into the public consciousness in the 2010s.
The play dares to be mundane: no giant tragedies or wild twists for added meaning. And yet I sat there completely rapt because the whole thing felt so real, and so delicately rendered. Both characters are fundamentally decent people, neither villain nor victim, and almost all of us will be Emma or James at some point in our lives; lots of us will be both.
Staged in the Burton Taylor’s black box studio, the minimalism here is cannily used to enhance the intimacy. The thoughtful, unobtrusive lighting design by Patryk Wisniewski does a lot of emotional heavy lifting. There are no costume changes, and a table and chairs are the only props.
If I had one critique, it would be that some of the dialogue in the third quarter states the subtext out loud. This slightly undermines the thrill thus far of the play not holding its viewer’s hand. Writers Charlotte Macari and Peter Hardisty (the latter of whom also directed) are at their most electric when they let us squirm slightly, such as in the piece’s disarmingly emotional opening monologue.
But this is a minor criticism of a bold, whip-smart, and moving new work - one that will linger with the viewer long after the lights go out.