Review: The Play’s The Thing, White Bear Theatre

Some people handle friendship disputes head-on. Others, like Maisie (Francesca D’Souza), write complex, metaphorical plays calling people out and invite the subjects to work out what they’re trying to say. In The Play’s The Thing we see this ill-advised situation play out across three points in time, each scene written and directed by a different member of the Happy Cannibals team. 

In the first segment, written and directed by Maya Yousif, a nepo-baby director (Andrew Friedman) tries to get his actress (Rachel Kitts) to tap into a deeper level of emotion. It starts out jovially enough, the pair joking around about nights out and their university days back at Bristol, but before long the knives come out and things get uncomfortably personal. The script leans into slightly cringey – yet undeniably natural – conversation between Friedman and Witts, which they both handle with aplomb. The characters are painfully believable, with all their foibles and complexes, and display a good amount of depth in a short space of time. 

After the rehearsal ends in tears, we’re thrown into opening night (written and directed by Kitts). The play has just ended, and playwright Maisie wants to hear her friends’ (Jessica Wendy Murdouch and Anthony Hyro) thoughts. After the appropriate praise, she asks whether they really understand what it was all about. Again, the three characters are thoroughly fleshed out and the story is delivered with perfect pace. 

Finally, we see the aftermath of the performance through two audience members, a comedy couple made up of trodden-down businessman Ralph (Jacob Freda) and his overbearing wife (Ella Blackburn). Freda and Blackburn have excellent rapport here, bouncing off one another and truly seeming like an old married couple. Blackburn is scarily good at playing a very specific type of well-off middle-aged woman, while Freda’s controlled rage is wonderful to watch. This segment, written and directed by Murdoch, is the least naturalistic of the tryptic, leaning more into farce than emotional exploration.

The three segments have distinct differences between them, the tones complementary but not matching. Somehow it works – rather than feeling disjointed, the play comes together as one complete work, the first and last scenes their own mini-dramas around Maisie’s central play. Occasionally the richness of emotion on show becomes a little overwrought, taking away from the well-constructed narrative, but overall the rollercoaster of hysteria and despair is pleasantly varied.

The Play’s The Thing is extremely well-performed and manages to fit a lot into 80 minutes. It mixes humour into a fairly dark tale of post-university friendship collapse, the horrors of trying to make it in the creative world without having a famous parent, and that awful feeling when you’re pretty sure everyone in the room knows something you don’t.

Written and Directed by Maya Yousif, Rachel Kitts, and Jessica Wendy Murdoch
Produced by Happy Cannibals

The Play’s The Thing plays at the White Bear Theatre until Saturday 31 October.