BWW Reviews: STREAMING, Pleasance Theatre, November 13 2014

Rosa's mother, a City lawyer, has died and that hardly helped Toby, her father, who takes another drink for every call not returned and, since he's stalled in the wheeler-dealer world of Mergers and Acquisitions, that's plenty. As the red demands mount up, Rosa and Toby downsize to a flat on a sink estate, with Toby out of a job and Rosa contemplating Sixth Form at a local comprehensive - a far cry from her public schooling to date. Across the corridor lives, or rather hides, Candy, whose combination of a dodgy boob-job and agoraphobia makes her perfectly suited to her job as a webcam girl, a fantasy figure for men willing to pay £3.50 per minute to watch her perform. Soon Candy is working through her sister issues with Rosa, while Rosa works through her mummy issues with Candy. And Toby? He hits the bottle even harder.

Streaming (continuing at the Pleasance Theatre until 30 November) like Cans reviewed last week, is a bold, funny, clever, but ultimately moving examination of a corner of life happening right here, right now. No wobbly American accents, no revival of a sure thing, no adaptation of a film - just Pipeline Theatre doing contemporary drama. It's the kind of drama that does an old-fashioned job - it holds a mirror up to the world and asks us what we think of what we see.

Working on Alan and Jude Munden's brilliantly adaptable set - one that can transform from living room to corridor to peep show almost instantaneously - the three actors do not so much play as inhabit their roles, crucially investing these extreme people with an achingly vulnerable humanity.There's excellent work too from Nix Woods on puppets and Jon Welch on lighting, the two working in tandem to create an otherworldly quality to the most ordinary of flat's interior.

Kyla Goodey's Candy is uneducated, damaged and about as distant from Anna Munden's Rosa as one can imagine, yet their friendship blossoms naturally, the tiniest looks and gestures bringing them together. Angus Brown's Toby may have no redeeming features, but we understand that he is a man made bad and not a bad man, a judgement underpinned in a beautiful and touching scene in a taxi with Candy. Anna Munden has a lot to do transforming Rosa from a posh, sullen teen into something quite different, and does so in a sensational performance that carries Jon Welch's script for well over two hours. If any of these three had toppled into caricature, the delicate balance of this outstanding play would have been lost, its ecology broken.

In many ways, Streaming is a universal story, but, told like this, it is both up to date and highly relevant to the way we live today. And uniquely theatrical.

.

To post a comment, you must register and login.