Orla Wyatt writes about catastrophic nights. Unlike so many modern dramatists (like Miriam Battye, whose fascinating dissection of female friendship, Scenes With Girls, precedes The Slip at the Burton Taylor this week), Wyatt has no time for the drama of everyday life. She pits her nervous, immature characters against the remorseless, grown-up bureaucracy of British institutions like the Police and the NHS. Watching her work is like spending an evening in front of Casualty and Happy Valley concentrated into an intense hour of revelations and confrontations.
Her first play, A&E, was set in a hospital waiting room full of drug addicts and wounded criminals in police custody. It had a surreal, comic ambience that counterbalanced the seriousness of its situation. The Slip is different – but every bit as gripping. It’s dark, focused, and mixes everyday emotions with extraordinary violence, like an early Coen Brothers movie.
It’s the middle of the night. Four friends driving home from a party have swerved and run over a passing pedestrian on a dark country lane. One by one, they’re interviewed by a police detective (played with cool detachment by Cait Kremenstein). And one by one, their stories start to fall apart. Wyatt intercuts the cross-examinations with the friends back at home the next morning, discussing what really happened. And what seems initially like a tragic accident turns out to be something much more disturbing. It’s toxic friendship spilling over into murder.
Danny Boyle’s breakthrough thriller Shallow Grave hovers in the background of The Slip like a weird uncle giving advice about drugs, and there are few better examples of tight, suspense-filled drama from which to draw inspiration. But where Wyatt really excels is in her control of leaking clues. The first interviewee, Archie (Callum Beardmore), is completely convincing: traumatised, sweating, just trying to remember the details of the accident. But inconsistencies start to float to the surface just as we think we know what’s going on. Christina (Maisie Lambert) remembers hearing someone say ‘Ten fucking points’; a speed camera proves that there was a gap of eleven minutes before the group called for an ambulance; and back home, internal tensions in the group start to split open, with Daniel (Alex Smith) whispering about what ‘really happened’, and Billy’s (Sam Drury’s) pious claims of being traumatised being pounced on by Christina with one of the show’s key outbursts: ‘Trauma clearly doesn’t affect your ability to be a cunt.’
The Slip is uncomplicated but devastating. It dramatizes the kind of competitive relationships we can all relate to by pushing them beyond the boundaries of normal behaviour. Watching it feels oddly old-fashioned, like reading a Ray Bradbury short story or an EC comic, or watching an episode of The Twilight Zone from the late 1950s: lurid, pulp fictions with a satisfying twist in the tail. And as in those mid-century prurient parables, the characters end up revealing all before submitting to their fate: yes, I did it because he always bullied me at school, and now I’m getting my revenge. The final image, hinting at another murder about to take place, may stretch credulity if this were realism, but it perfectly suits the grand guignol of those pot-boiler morality tales.
Maisie Lambert, as the drunk Christina sitting in the back seat, delivers the sort of performance regular theatregoers will expect from one of Oxford’s most natural actors. The sound of her vomiting into a bucket during her police interview is so convincing that it produces a few involuntary retches from the audience. And Callum Beardmore, as the driver Archie, moves from innocent to murderous avenger so subtly that you can hardly see the switch. Alex Smith as Daniel ramps up the tension with his feverishly logical excuses for lying. And Sam Drury as Billy makes a convincing psychopath – and I mean that in a nice way.
These are great days for new writing at Oxford. And The Slip proves that Orla Wyatt’s first medical drama wasn’t just a flash in the bed-pan. The difficult second play was a doddle. What’s next?