What would that grand master of the art of pauses Harold Pinter have made of this play? Annie Baker's extraordinary low-key drama, now playing a sellout run at the National Theatre's Dorfman stage, lasts more than three hours and the pauses are phenomenal. But it works. Believe me (long pause): it works.
Exactly how it works is more difficult to explain. But Baker and director Sam Gold know exactly what they are doing, stretching the silences between the lines until they become unbearable, and they're not afraid to move all the characters offstage at the same time. It's a tribute to their mastery of subtext and meaning that the audience immediately suspects something really interesting is afoot when the actors disappear for half a minute.
Baker is a youngish American playwright from New England whose play Circle Mirror Transformation made a big impact when the Royal Court Theatre staged it off-site in a disused community centre in Hackney three years ago. That production was one of the best shows I saw in 2013, with an entirely British cast taking on the roles of five men and women who sign up for a weekly drama class.
This time we get to see what is essentially the Pulitzer-winning American production, with two American actors from the original cast. As with Circle Mirror Transformation, the three principal characters gradually reveal themselves over a long sequence of short scenes in which their growing knowledge of each other drives the story. And the style is overwhelmingly naturalistic. Sam, Rose and new employee Avery make up the staff of The Flick, a small New England cinema, one of the last few venues that has yet to convert from 35mm film projection to digital. While Rose is the projectionist, Sam and Avery are responsible for selling soda and popcorn, and cleaning up the debris between screenings.
The audience faces the cinema's shabby lines of seats and the flickering light of the projector. Film music echoes around us but we can't of course see what is being projected over our heads. The drama we witness starts with the repeated sweeping up of popcorn and leftover soft drink cans and bottles, a daily purgatory for the underpaid employees of Steve, the unseen cinema owner. Seated in Row B of the Dorfman, a few feet from the stage, I made an instant resolution never ever to leave litter under my seat again in a theatre.
The three principals give performances of great subtlety; thanks to their wonderful sense of timing, in which silence sometimes seems more eloquent than words, the play moves from uses what appears to be a dramatically unpromising setup to create a real drama out of banality. Unlike Pinter, in whose plays aggression and threat are never far away, Baker creates ordinary characters who are deeply flawed but mostly considerate to each other. When their alliance collapses at the end of the play, the effect is made more powerful by the relatively friendly interactions that have gone before.
Sam (Matthew Maher) is a complex kind of loser, still living with his parents in his late 30s and unable to progress beyond the lowly role of popcorn sweeper. The American dream has passed him by, though Baker does not over-emphasise the social and political context. His relationship with Rose (Louisa Krause) is distant but, as we discover, it has hidden depths. Rose, with her black heavy boots and punkish green hair, is something of an enigma both to the audience and to Sam. Baker is an expert user of dramatic irony, and as the play unfolds in a series of two-handed scenes, we gradually start to know more about the characters than they do themselves.
Avery is the only one of the three main characters who is obsessed with films and film-making rather than seeing as a way of earning a living. A middle-class black student, the 20-year-old son of a professor at a local Massachusetts university, he seems to inhabit a different world, not just from Sam and Rose, but from the rest of his environment. His obsession with film hides a problem with depression and an inability to relate to others. The role is superbly played by RADA graduate Jaygann Ayeh, who gives a terrific performance that balances between puppyish naivety and frozen fear.
The last play I saw before The Flick was also a three-hander. Harold Pinter's The Caretaker at the Old Vic also explores three people whose life is going nowhere and who take refuge in fantasy. It's much darker and menacing than Baker's play, which owes more to Chekhov. When the cinema is sold at the end of the play and converted to digital, there are echoes of the sale of the estate to the upstart businessman Lopakhin and the destruction of the cherry orchard. But as in The Caretaker, there is a sense in this play that three into two won't go; when two characters gang up against the third, it becomes obvious that one will have to leave.
I suspect tickets are now unobtainable for the rest of the run of this play. I only got mine thanks to a stroke of luck -- a late release of extra seats just before I visited the National's box office. But if you can borrow, steal or buy a ticket for the Dorfman to see this exceptional new American play, don't miss the opportunity.
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