When Jerry Seinfeld pitched his new sitcom to NBC in 1989 he told them it would be a show about nothing. Just people talking to each other while doing... stuff. One of the greatest episodes consisted simply of Jerry and his friends waiting for a table in a Chinese restaurant. A generation earlier, the episode of Porridge that shines out like a beacon of comic brilliance is the one where Fletcher and Godber spend the entire 30 minutes talking in their cell.
Great writers like Larry David, Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais knew that talking about nothing meant you could talk about everything. And Annie Baker knows it too. Her Pulitzer-winning play The Flick features some cinema workers cleaning the seats after screenings. That’s all. But it’s the journey inwards that counts, not along. And that journey is mesmerising, tragic, funny, and potholed with unrequited love.
The Flick is three hours long. The last comparable running time to this in Oxford was Monstrous Regiment earlier this term, a play packed with so much incident it had about a hundred scenes and twenty different locations. And it seemed to go on for ever. The Flick, despite its characters doing little more than sweeping up bits of popcorn almost in slow motion, flies by. Emotional profundity trumps superficial action every time. This is why the two workers debate the merits of Avatar in one crucial scene: Sam thinks it’s a great movie. But Avery - the true film buff, and the one character whom you sense Annie Baker is feeding with her own cultural manifesto - knows it’s just an animated video game.
Like a millennial version of The Caretaker, Avery enters the dark, shoddy world of Sam and projectionist Rose, and acts as a catalyst for a broken love triangle: Sam loves Rose. Rose loves Avery. Avery loves no one (except Quentin Tarantino apparently). Together, they form a united underclass, fighting a doomed battle against the rise of digital cinema and the fall of society.
In Josh Robey’s brilliantly paced, perfectly designed production, every pause matters. Every scoop of the brush and every glance through the projection window are loaded with meaning. And it all happens in a set that perfectly conjures the little, indie movie-theatre where the story unfolds. If last week’s Things I Know To Be True showed what can be done design-wise in a large space, The Flick is probably the most effective design I’ve ever seen in the small confines of the Burton Taylor. Robey and designer Holly Rust (who worked together just a few weeks ago on the inspired Company at the Playhouse) have turned the theatre around, so that the audience faces the usual seating bleachers. Covered in red fabric, those seats become the recently-vacated auditorium of the Flick Cinema. And the entrance to the BT itself, visible in the background, becomes the entrance to the cinema, part of the action of the play. A spotlight behind a sheet of glass becomes the projector. It sounds so simple, but it works perfectly, enhanced by details like an audible background clicking of film sprockets, lighting that resembles the reflected images of films, and, between scenes, the ghostly figure of a stage manager strewing popcorn over the seats in a never-ending cascade of human litter.
Annie Baker’s work last graced the Oxford theatre scene a couple of months ago with Circle, Mirror, Transformation, another spellbinding petri-dish drama that placed a small group of characters in a trapped scenario, and watched them work it out. Both plays make incredibly bold use of silence. But where Circle, Mirror, Transformation used it as nervous pauses pregnant with words no one dares to say, The Flick uses silence as the natural state of people whose working lives are devoid of excitement. When you spend all day sweeping discarded sweet-wrappers off the floor, life is not a chat show. Judgmental glances and awkward implications go a long way. In fact, the play quite deliberately sucks all the conventional drama out of its scenes, leaving us fascinated for the tiny moments when meaningful things happen. Towards the end, Rose allows Sam to switch on the projector. His joy, and her pleasure in his joy, as they laugh, unheard, behind the projectionist’s window, sum up the hesitant but real emotional connections this play concocts.
None of this would be possible without a trio (quartet to be fair) of actors so top-notch that the notch-o-meter has actually run out of notches. Andrew Spielmann is a Baker veteran from Circle, Mirror, Transformation, and as Sam he harbours a wounded, rejected passion with tragic believability. Ezana Betru as Avery is one of those actors who seems to get better and better each time you see him, and here his awkwardness and fear of causing offence is contagious. And Thalia Kermisch as Rose balances world-weariness and affection, reliability and brokenness, boredom and amusement, with uncanny poise. During one unbearable scene, where Sam confesses his love for her, she doesn’t say a word for about four minutes. She hardly changes posture or expression. And yet the tumult of emotions raging through her is palpable. There’s a hint of early Jodie Foster in Kermisch’s performance, which, let’s face it, is no bad thing.
At the climax of the play, Avery re-enacts Samuel L Jackson’s famous Ezekiel 25:17 monologue from Pulp Fiction. It’s a great rendition in itself. But it’s also laden with meaning for The Flick: it’s a man yearning for a better life, an escape from the dirty, dead-end job he’s stuck in. But even more than that, it’s a statement from Annie Baker about the influence of Tarantino on modern American culture. The unchained melody of his early scripts (written with Roger Avary, before Tarantino became a parody of his own post-modern schtick) opened a door for writers like Baker, and there’s a sense that she’s acknowledging that in this play.
What more can I say? I guess it’s just a phenomenal piece of theatre, put on by a phenomenal company, and performed by a phenomenal group of actors. Sometimes, not often, that’s just what it is.