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Gifted
By Peter Billingham
Director – Chris Loveless
White Bear Theatre
27 April to 16 May 2010
A review by Bernie Whelan for EXTRA! EXTRA! One of the many problems with Gifted is its lack of moral compass, which is odd since it seems fundamentally concerned with moral issues. Fran is a teenage ‘A’ level student destined for Cambridge, gifted intellectually and morally. She is critical of her father for dealing in arms to Iraq and his domineering relationship with her mother who is on the verge of nervous collapse. She insists on revising Romeo and Juliet with her best friend Mocha, a streetwise Black girl more concerned with sexuality than study, whose father is fighting in Iraq and who falls in love with Fran. Meanwhile, Fran adopts Norman, a troubled homeless Falklands veteran who suffers from PTSD and seems to long for release from his torment one moment but shares her poetic sensibility and carries her away with his lust for life the next. Fran falls in love with Norman, and decides since she can’t save her mother or her best friend Fran from unhappiness, she will rescue him. Without giving the ending away, I have to say I found it utterly unconvincing. The play seems to argue that anyone who cares this much is destined to commit nihilistic acts in a society where there is precious little to give meaning or sense to life. Another problem is the sheer number of issues the play attempts to deal with. Just one of the above would be enough for a Radio 4 Afternoon Play and my advice would be, as Willie Russell had Rita say, ‘Do it on the radio’. It did have that rather worthy, preachy feel of radio theatre too. The characters have too much to say to the point where they seem to be vessels for the writer’s urge to soliloquise, often voicing a remarkably uniform language of opposites borrowed from Shakespeare but sounding unconvincingly out of character. Would Norman, the homeless veteran, say that the bullet he caught in the Falklands ‘longs for a gun like Jesus longed for Judas’ or Mocha say that she longs for Fran like ‘night longs for day’? Less imagery of this kind would have allowed the characters to develop and the play to come alive. As it is written, the play feels weighed down by cliché and too many issues. However, the acting at times was very good. Saffhire Joy shone as Mocha and her exchanges with the streetwise young David Bonnick Jnr as her suitor, Chris really engaged the audience. The scene where Mocha declares her love for Fran was very moving. Kitty Martin was superb as the over-medicated mother. The scene where her irredeemably selfish husband, played by Adrian Francis, waits imperiously for her to put on and lace up his shoes was uncomfortable to watch, but convincingly played by both actors. The White Bear theatre is a very intimate setting, there were just minimal props but effective lighting with few distractions from the facial expressions and movements of the actors around the tiny stage so that the audience could see the sweat glisten and the lips tremble. However, the space could have been used more imaginatively, the characters generally didn’t move while they were speaking and then when they did move, often quite violently, the movements seemed wooden and unconvincing. If the writer Peter Billingham’s target is contemporary nihilism, he does not make it clear whether he is celebrating or criticising it. Fran’s use of her phone to capture disturbing images of her own anti-human act of despair highlights the dichotomy between a technologically advanced society connecting everyone and the excruciating loneliness or alienation of the individual. Terry Eagleton’s comment in Evil that ‘death is both a lack of being and an excess of it’ seems apposite in a world where there is so much meaningless junk around. Ultimately, this play fails to make a meaningful comment on the situation, which leaves it opens to the charge of a form of nihilism itself.
Box Office: 020 7735 8664 Ticket Prices £12, concessions £10
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