Review: An IQ Test for my Birthday, Tower Theatre

Writers’ Room: Home

Review: An IQ Test for my Birthday, Tower Theatre

Summary

Rating

60

Good

A short and experimental new play concerning obsession with the IQ test, offering enjoyable acting and one standout performance.

The theme of this short and experimental one act play at Tower Theatre is our obsession with intelligence, as measured and validated by the metrics of an IQ test. For one character, the goofy university dropout-turned-gardener Callie (Helen Wieland), it is a thinly disguised vehicle to gain self-esteem and parental approval.

Twelve-year-old Becky (Eloise McCreedy), sees it as a gateway to the elite educational opportunities of high-performing Minecraft gamers, via a US summer camp. Becky is accompanied in the test room by her protective and hyper-anxious mother Sandra (Lucy Moss). Then for the young Guardian journalist, played by Fred McMahon, it is an emotional journey in reverse. Now tasked with caring for his father who is undergoing cognitive decline, he confronts the possibility that an IQ test taken at the peak of his parent’s abilities might have provided a baseline against which to persuade the doctors that something is wrong now. His father’s deterioration is obvious to him, but hard to demonstrate without the right evidence.

The production requires only four swivel chairs and an off-stage invigilator voice over a Tannoy, but is otherwise rich in time-space experimentation. The test-induced anxiety of each of the four characters is crafted as four parallel interior monologues. The choice of having all four of them acted out in rapid synchronicity means each monologue appears to be capturing a different essence of our obsession with IQ measurement: a rather crucial element of the play. The theatrical device of frantic, parallel acting does not serve the script well on this. The directing choice could perhaps make more concession to the audience and to intelligibility if the four voices were to overlap only in part, perhaps only at the start and at the end of each monologue.

Outside of this experiment, however the script flows well, from the improbable start to the poignant end and we should look forward to more theatre writing from Melanie Bell.

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An IQ Test for my Birthday is playing as part of a series of shorts as part of Writers’ Room: Home. The other plays are Difficult to Describe, Understand or Measure, Homemakers and When You Go to Ireland.

Written by: Melanie Bell
Directed by: Ragan Keefer
Produced by: Tower Theatre Writers’ Room

Writers’ Room: Home plays at Tower Theatre until 16 December. Further information can be found here.