Review: CROOKED DANCES, The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon

Katy is on the Eurostar busily reading cuttings in preparation for her interview with celebrated pianist Silvia de Zingaro. She's fretting about her job, her future, her boyfriend. Nick chances to sit opposite her and - would you believe it - he's the photographer on the gig. He's fretting about a Tinder date.

Via a contrivance or two (some of which stretched my credulousness to breaking point) our intrepid pair find themselves at Silvia's country retreat in a woods so remote that wolves howl in the dark. With no internet and both phones out of power, there's just the three of them and Silvia's fussy manager, Denis, left without their own devices. Things start to go bumpy in the night.

Robin French's new play is very much one of two halves. The first has much to say about how we live today, with Silvia railing against how screen based distractions are destroying the pleasure, even the ability, to concentrate sufficiently for the great works of art and philosophy to be appreciated in their full glory.

Katy is all "Yes, but..." defending Millennials' dependence on tech and knowing that the real story is the hitherto secret private life of Silvia about which, Katy reckons, she must be ready to talk - or why ask for the interview? But things turn out to be much crazier than that.

All four performances are excellent (even if the star of the show is designer Basia Binkowska's perfectly realised 1970s set). Jeany Spark feels a little over the top as Katy, but once we understand the stakes, her dogged desperation appears not just justified but necessary. Olly Mott's photographer is a little too Cockney wide boy at the start and doesn't have much to do in the second half, but he gets the comic relief right and looks magnificently uncomfortable in polyester.

Ben Onwukwe's Denis is another character who establishes himself nicely and then largely disappears from the play, but the solicitous manager (who might be more than that and who definitely knows more) cuts an intriguing figure - Katy should have interviewed him!

Ruth Lass dominates the second half of the show with her devotion to the music of Erik Satie revealed to be rather more than purely aesthetic or necessarily expeditious. Lass is convincing as the now ageing pianist with a past full of mysterious glamour - the flashes of "artistic temperament", the way she glides weightlessly across the floor, the charm when needed. It's always nice to see an understated performance of a wildly over the top character.

For all that (and some spectacular video projection work from the RSC's in-house team), the second half collapses in on itself, the mystery of Satie's reclusive last years that so fascinated Silvia appearing like so much mumbo-jumbo, despite long stretches of exposition during which my mind drifted. There are good points made about the nature of time and music's illustration of it (try this as an example) but the hackneyed New Age stuff buries it. And there's at least one gaping plot hole that rather undermines the conclusion and almost had me standing up to advise Katy, so smart the rest of the time.

There's a shorter, more focused, play in here that has plenty to say about the way we live today, the four characters a nice blend of old and new. But we lose that as the last 45 minutes veers off into territory that gets fuzzier and fuzzier when it should be getting clearer and clearer. By the end, I was more than sated with Satie and satyrs.

Crooked Dances continues at The Other Place, Stratford upon Avon until 13 July.

Photo Ellie Kurttz

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