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This show takes an ‘everything plus the kitchen sink’ approach but needs to decide what it wants to be.Summary
Rating
Ok
Late one night Nell (Geebs Marie Williams) and Toby (James Chetwood) meet in a club in Clapham. They end the night out at sea on a boat belonging to Toby’s dad, dancing along to the Beach Boys and fending off ‘air pirates’. A normal night out in Clapham – it happens to the best of us sometimes.
Thirst does not lack ambition or concept, and any number of the ideas that it offers would be worth investigating. Unfortunately, here it feels like writer Ashley Milne has thrown everything in. Every idea is hammered into shape to fit into a particular place, but that idea does not necessarily fit that place. We’ve got kidnap and extortion, revenge, the climate crisis, miracle and prophecy, love and loss, family, death, suicide, guns and hijacked boats and even more. It’s just too crammed.
There are some moments which do show the talent behind the show, both in Milne’s script and, in particular, from directors Rebecca McGreevy and Jessy Roberts. The staging of the reveal of Flora (Tallula Francis) is excellent and brings large laughs from the audience. The setting of the scene-change to another time and place is technically well done and it at least looks effective. However, it isn’t effective in the story: it comes out of nowhere and it is only by reading the very last lines of the show blurb that we understand it is intended that these things have happened before and will happen again. On stage, it simply confuses.
Thirst premiered as part of Omnibus Theatre’s Engine Room project and it has clearly had a bit of an overhaul since then. There it was described as “a love story spanning from the dawn of time to the end of it.” This new version appears to have excised much of that main story, but at the same time left so many links and connections to it in place that it just doesn’t hang together.
When Thirst figures out what it wants to be and focuses on that, rather than taking an ‘everything and the kitchen sink’ approach, there is almost certainly something really interesting lurking beneath these depths, but until then this is a disappointment.
Written by: Ashley Milne
Directed by: Rebecca McGreevy and Jessy Roberts
Produced by: Teastain Theatre
Thirst played as part of VAULT Festival 2023. It has completed its current run.
