Review: Watershed, Playhouse East

Everything goes right for Annie (Chessika Warin-Boyd) in Watershed. We meet her as she waits for her A-level results, and for boyfriend Hugo (Matthew Irvine) to invite her on a family holiday to South Africa. The successful outcomes of both of these things will, she believes, be a lifetime of happiness and success.

In the perfect town of Cherryfield, things always work out the way they should. Everyone is happy, all the time, and nothing bad happens. So Annie is pretty sure everything’s going to be perfect. But real life doesn’t always go the way you want it to.

First, the painfully bombastic Hugo wants them to take a break – so that he can hook up with other girls when he heads off to Exeter for uni. Then, she only gets AAB – not the AAA grades she needs for Oxford. Then, at a results day party with best friend Yaz (Emma Hickman), things get even worse. Annie gets a call that her mum (Abby Doubtfire) has died. In the face of tragedy, Annie begins to break down; and is pulled out of the action by the director of the TV show she stars in.

Conceptually, the Truman Show-esque setup is an interesting one, but there’s not quite enough scaffolding at the start of the play to keep it up. The show begins with the director (of both the play and the TV show inside it, Esme Pitman) calling action, but it’s never made entirely clear from the start that Annie lives inside a TV show. Also requiring more grounding is Annie’s relationship with her mother. Of course it’s sad when Annie learns that she has died, but we don’t have any real idea of their dynamic.

There’s a fair dose of quite absurd humour here which really works (Hugo is haunted by his lost foreskin, for instance – pretty out there), and Warin-Boyd has great comic delivery, cheerfully proclaiming that if things don’t get out she might as well just off herself right there and then.

At other points, though, the play relies too heavily on funny voices to get laughs, rather than its own content. There are also a few points where the humour is distasteful rather than entertaining – Epstein jokes are a theme, and the concept of Yaz’s grandma (Michael Seabrook) being a pal of the paedophile is, for lack of a better word, icky, and feels somewhat juvenile.

The musical aspect of Watershed (courtesy of composer and musical director Henry Roberts) – for this is also a musical – is fun, with clever lyrics and snappy choreography (India Giles). Ominous guitar from Thomas Drake accompanies Roberts’ keyboard, adding a sense of disquiet to the moments that jar Annie from her perfect life.

Watershed is an interesting exploration of grief and the pressure to ignore it, to work through and put on a mask. Both funny and, particularly at its finale, touching, its inventiveness and absurdism make for a singular evening out.

Written by Emma Hickman
Directed by Esme Pitman
Choreography by India Giles
Composer/musical director: Henry Roberts

Watershed has concluded its run at Playhouse East.