Review: Imaginary Friends, Soho Theatre

What do Piers Morgan, Jeremy Clarkson and Nadine Dorries all have in common (besides the obvious)? The answer, as unlikely as it seems, is that they all live rent-free in the mind of Daniel Bye’s latest protagonist, who inhabits an expansive imaginary world built up inside his own head as he struggles through both a personal tragedy and the constant stress of deadlines for his fictional current affairs comedy programme. 

Right off the bat, it’s clear that Bye is a master manipulator of the fourth wall. The show starts without any fanfare or music, just Bye politely sidling up to the edge of the stage to quietly offer pre-amble and content warnings, reassuring us that the show hasn’t started at all when it in fact quite seamlessly has. Not even the interval is spared, with Bye making light of the theatre’s apparent need for drinks revenue over the uninterrupted flow of his art.

It’s a shame, then, that this mastery of the fourth wall can’t help the show defy the meandering confusion it builds up throughout its 90-minute runtime. Almost everything in the story told here is difficult to make sense of, clearly according to the author’s intent, but just as clearly to the show’s detriment as a piece of theatre. The narrative jumps from personal tragedy to imagined scenarios with big-name celebrities in cliched confrontations that Bye’s character inevitably seems to boringly squeeze past without saying or doing much of lasting interest. It’s all imaginary, but vanishingly little of it is imaginative.

The content warnings at the start of the play hint at interesting dilemmas and conflicts, but milquetoast events of the play speaks to Bye’s uninspired approach to these. Things take a turn for the especially dire when Bye’s character becomes focused on the extinction of humanity, either from climate change, rogue AI or a combination of the two, driving Bye’s character to try and accelerate the process. So he goes on TV saying so, everyone agrees, and the world begins to end. It’s all flimsy and arbitrary, and none of it feels supported by the rest of the show.

Bye knows what he’s doing, and he does it well, as the show’s performance and techniques can’t be faulted for their execution, but the story told here lacks coherence, meaning and value. As Bye himself says at the end, it’s still in active development. Hopefully, this will result in a more compelling show in the future.

Written and Performed by Daniel Bye

Imaginary Friends plays at the Soho Theatre until Saturday 24 May