Review: THE LESSON, The Hope Theatre

The pupil comes prepared for her lesson: pens, notepad, ruler. The professor apologises for being late. The lesson begins. And then, the lesson really begins. In Matthew Parker's clever new production of Ionesco's play, everything is in order but nothing makes sense.

Set across a long desk in the professor's home, The Lesson is both intimate and philosophical. The space is small, but the the ideas are big, and more often than not, bizarre. If you haven't stretched your philosophy muscles in a while, The Hope is a good place to do so.

Ionesco's work is distinguished by its rapid-fire dialogue, quick bursts of clever, quirky utterances that sound sophisticated but also smack of the absurd. Like a machine gun made of jelly, the text fires one thousand rounds per minute of bizarre, often humorous, observations and grievances.

Roger Alborough and Sheetal Kapoor, as the professor and his pupil respectively, are in fine comedic form - breathlessly quick and increasingly agitated, lecturing, answering, and questioning.

While The Lesson is enjoyable for its fine performances and fast-paced direction, the text, from 1951, is a product of its time and a victim of its genre. Fans - and critics - will note the usual hallmarks of absurdist comedies: circular dialogue, spontaneous violence, a stubborn insistence that everything you've seen here tonight is universal and timeless.

If you have any experience at all with the like - say, you've seen Waiting for Godot recently, and still have the taste on your tongue - you may find yourself predicting grand surprises and twists in The Lesson with ease.

Still, it's hard to complain about a show that can offer the cadence of The Gilmore Girls with the inquiry of Camus. And anyway, you shouldn't complain. The professor doesn't like that...

The Lesson at The Hope Theatre until 13 October

Photo credit: LH Photography

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