Review: LEOPARDS, Rose Theatre

Ben, all alpha-maleing and mansplaining, has agreed a meeting with Niala, coquettish in a cocktail dress, in an upscale hotel bar. He is a face in the environmental movement, a celebrity charity CEO and she wants to salve her conscience with a career shift into more ethical work. They chat for a bit - inconsequentially, if amusingly - but we all know what's going to happen.

Alys Metcalf's new play, her first full scale production, presses one hot button topic after another: sex, consent, shifting behavioural norms, celebrity, race, forgiveness, grief, psychological damage, redemption and a few more no doubt. Sometimes the issues come so quickly that one longs for the interval that never comes (the play is 100 minutes or so all-through) just to navigate a little of the moral maze into which we've been dropped to find a clear space for a moment's contemplation - but we have to wait until we're outside to take that deep breath.

Saffron Coomber (Niala) and Martin Marquez (Ben) may start as stereotypes, but soon have to find the specificities of their characters, each of whom is harbouring secrets. The drama turns on whether we believe in the two very different people who emerge in the second half of the play and that transformation turns on Metcalf's script - your reviewer could not. We're provided with rich backstories for both, but the characters never gain the rounded coherent humanity they need - each is the aggregate of their issues, vehicles for argument rather than flesh and blood.

Posters around the foyer and elsewhere implore the punters (and us press) not to spoil the show for future audiences, but the revelations are more of the "Uh huh" whispered under the breath variety rather than the eye-bulging "What...?" gaspers (and the play's opaque title becomes a mini-spoiler too, because about the only thing we know about leopards is what they don't do). Ultimately, the dramatic structure is too wobbly to sustain the ambition of the writer's breadth of subject matter - there's a better, smaller, play inside that hotel, but we only catch a glimpse or two of it.

Leopards is at the Rose Theatre until 25 September

Photo Iona Firouzabadi

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