As devoid of substance as the eponymous food, American Candy leaves a sour taste in the mouth. Rating
OK!
The aspirational synopsis of American Candy is mouthwatering and suggests a cutting social satire with a darkly comic edge. Unfortunately, it comes across as just a bit mean and nasty, with a few good gags to paper over the cracks. The billed cultural commentary comes in on-the-nose monologues or rants from individual characters that don’t really fit their context. There’s no building of meaningful situations or shaping of motivations.
Daniel is a controlling husband with a timid, kept wife, Sabrina. The performance opens with him supposedly leaving her to head to the airport for work when the set, which begins as a bed with curtains, (rather laboriously) transforms into one of those bizarre empty sweet or tourist shops that you see in the West End.
Connor and Zaynab are the bored employees of ‘American Candy’ doing suspiciously little all day but still getting paid. It’s an early reveal, but Daniel is actually running this illicit operation and, not only that, is having an affair with his employee. Fine, at this point, there’s some farcical situational potential. But once Daniel has left the scene again, somehow Sabrina wanders into this very sweet shop. The geography of their home is never established. Even though she is acutely diabetic, she browses a shop full of sugar for ‘hours’ before collapsing. This is the hilarious next step the writer decides upon.
Without going through every story beat, these are the types of wild swings the plot takes (with the accompanying repeated, long set changes) as it moves towards what would be quite a satisfying conclusion if Sabrina had not been so chronically underused and over-stereotyped. She is essentially always in a diabetic slump as she has her body moved into a basement by the goofy ‘American Candy’ staff, or she is gaslit and coercively controlled by Daniel. Call it sensitivity, but hopefully this is starting to become less funny to you, too. Daniel hits Connor in the shop, someone who abjectly looks up to him. Another bullying victim. When Sabrina wakes up to say something is hard to tell with “you people”, Connor argues that it is his white gypsyness and Zaynab is playing “that [brown] card” to assume it’s directed at her. And on and on.
To be fair, playwright Tom Murray is trying to observe and tackle some serious issues, but the events of the play do not match up, and too many ideas seem to be matting together to create a bit of a mess. The idea that American Candy epitomises the growing emptiness of capitalism and explores the possibility that this emptiness might facilitate corruption is ripe territory. Meanwhile, many of these shops are indeed incredibly suspicious – full of stock but no customers. But apart from a crooked boss (incidentally, we never learn what exactly Daniel is profiting from), all of Murray’s intentions are just not present in the piece. With that absence, you have all the nastiness but not enough of the satire.
Poor Grace Longman as Sabrina has very little to do. Layla Chowdhury (producer of The Mango Ensemble) plays Zaynab as the most functioning character. Joseph Pape is often successful when not too blatantly playing for laughs as Connor, who is the butt of many of the jokes. George Kirby-Smith, as Daniel, is genuinely menacing, which might be a strong ability to shift an atmosphere, but does a really horrible person work well in a comedy? Very difficult to say.
The puzzle pieces are there in American Candy, but unfortunately, they don’t fit together.
Playwright: Tom Murray
Director: Francesca Hsieh
Produced by The Mango Ensemble
Dramaturgy: Somebody Jones
Assistant Producer: Rosa Stilitz
Set & Costume Design: Ruby Brown
Lighting Design: Jahmiko Marshall
Composer & Sound Design: Conrad Kira
Fight & Intimacy Director: Rebecca Wilson
American Candy has finished its run at the Omnibus Theatre but continues on a UK tour.
