Review: Things Between Heaven and Earth, Hen and Chickens Theatre

Camden Fringe

A good thriller should guide us along to its final reveal. Step by step we should uncover more information that will ultimately lead us to the conclusion, giving us a chance to guess what that may be. But those steps need to be logical, evenly spaced, and most definitely not require us to make such a giant leap you would be eligible for the long jump at the Olympics. And that ultimately feels to be the major problem with Things Between Heaven and Earth – each scene too far apart from the previous.

Eric (played by the writer Jun Noh) is a famous author, home to attend the memorial for the husband of his close friend May (Marina Hata). But the opening scene is just too unclear, not really setting any suitable foundations for what is to come. It is also overly long and ponderous as the pair skirt around saying anything of importance.

It’s not assisted by Noh’s lack of vocal projection. At times his words are lost beneath the squeeze of a chair or their footsteps on the wooden floor. He is also prone to look moodily into space to show he is a deep thinker, but it instead just seems like an affectation. Thankfully Hata knows the requirements and delivers a much more worthy performance that at least adds some much needed energy to the whole thing.

Then we hit the problem of the clunky writing. Act two gives us a flashback of an interview with Eric as he discusses his books. The whole scene is there to allow us to learn how his first two books were very much autobiographical, but his third is more a work of fiction, or is it? There are some interesting ideas dropped in here and for a brief moment there is promise that an interesting play is about to emerge. But again it’s just slow and plodding, long monologues feel unnecessary, and there’s not nearly enough life to keep an audience engaged.

As we hit the third scene we are introduced to the real meat of the story, but so much of what is introduced here sits uncomfortably against what has come previously. Too many leaps are made to force information into the wide gaps of the plot, and they are too little too late to make for a cohesive story. It’s certainly way too late to pull the audience back in enough to make us care about what happens.

It is a shame, as the central idea of the show is appealing – that Eric may have killed May’s husband, and his third book is almost his confession to the fact. But to make this play work would require some heavy rewriting, cutting whole sections, feeding us the information regularly, finding ways to keep our attention and interest with clues.

There is always a lack of good thrillers on the fringe stage, so when they do crop up I am eager to savour them. But when the thrill is almost non existent it just leaves disappointment. Whether a rewrite is possible with what’s available here I just don’t know. What is clear is that in its current form it is condemned to fail.

Written and produced by: Jun Noh
Directed by: Joanna Rosenfeld
Sound design by: David Thomas

Things Between Heaven and Earth has completed its run for Camden Fringe.