As devoid of substance as the eponymous food, American Candy leaves a sour taste in the mouth. Rating
OK!
The aspirational synopsis of America Candy is mouthwatering and suggests a cutting social satire with a darkly comic edge. Unfortunately, the play 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, rather than through building meaningful situations and shaping motivations.
Daniel (George Kirby-Smith) is a controlling husband with a timid, kept wife, Sabrina (Grace Longman). It opens with him supposedly leaving her to head to the airport for work when the set, which begins as a bed with curtains before it, transforms (rather laboriously) into one of those bizarre empty sweet or tourist shops that you see in the West End. Connor (Joseph Pape) and Zaynab (Layla Chowdhury) 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 front, and not only that, is having an affair with employee Zaynab. 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 – although the geography to their home is not established – and even though she is acutely diabetic, she browses a shop full of sugar for “hours” before collapsing. This is the hilarious next step it decides upon.
Without going through every story beat, these are the types of wild swings (with the accompanying repeated, long set changes) the plot takes 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 slur 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 it’s 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.
Poor Longman, as Sabrina has very little to do. Chowdhury (producer at The Mango Ensemble) is the most functioning character. Pape, often successfully when not too blatant, plays for laughs as Connor, who is the butt of many of the jokes. Kirby-Smith as Daniel is genuinely menacing, which might demonstrate a strong ability to shift an atmosphere, but does a really horrible person work well in a comedy? Very difficult.
To be fair, playwright Tom Murray is trying to observe and tackle some serious issues, but the events of the play just do not match up to them, 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 exploring the possibility for corruption that this emptiness might facilitate is ripe territory. Meanwhile, many of these shops are indeed incredibly suspicious – full of stock but no customers. It does seem to be an open secret as to the purpose of these businesses. But apart from a crooked boss at ‘American Candy’ (incidentally, we never learn what exactly he is profiting from), all of Murray’s intention is just not present in the piece. In that absence, you have all the nastiness but not enough of the satire.
The pieces are there, but don’t fit together in the same puzzle.
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.
