Review: IKARIA, Old Red Lion Theatre

The subject of the last play I saw at this venue was Philip Larkin - his most famous poem was on my mind often while watching this searing new play.

Simon is one of those posh kids you meet at university - well spoken, nervous, a little unworldly, his expensive education is still underway, but it's no closer to preparing him for the rigours of the real world than it was in prep school. You also meet the likes of Mia too - very bright, also a little naive, insecure in this brave new world, but making friends and cresting the obstacles almost before they've presented themselves. She's finding her place in an ever-expanding world and he's losing his in one that's shrinking by the day.

At first sight, they're an odd couple - but not really. Both are the Exotic Others that they each need. Simon fascinates Mia with his effortless Hugh Grantish charm and Mia fascinates Simon with her unburdened openness. When emotional insecurity meets emotional security, but everything else is flipped, it's a heady mix - believe me...

The action takes place in Simon's dorm room and, as we suspect but Mia doesn't, so does Simon's life. He's missed a year already with that old standby, 'glandular fever', and can't get started on his dissertation despite his evident love of the subject (Classics - natch) and the support, albeit distant, he gets from his tutors. Mia misses these red flags (never having known her father and very close to her mother, she doesn't know the havoc dysfunctional families can wreak) but she loves her strange bf and he loves his talented gf in return.

If you couldn't see where this was going, the ever-intrusive trigger warnings will have alerted you, but it doesn't really matter as the power of this play comes in its telling.

In this hugely promising debut, Philippa Lawford has written a drama that takes a hot button issue like men's mental health and almost forgotten about it until she has the characters to carry a compelling story - there's plenty of much more experienced writers could learn a lot from that. Such care is taken to create this tight physical space, this island in a raging sea of anger, hormones and hope / no hope, that one almost forgets that there's a message. It's an understated approach that lends enormous power to the gut-punches to come.

If anything, Lawford is even more impressive in her directing, allowing minutes to pass with no words spoken as we both observe the trauma unfolding in perfectly judged excrutiating silence and, almost involuntarily, reflect on how we got to this point. Everywhere one usually sees the volume turned up to shouting levels, this play turns it down - as if Eastenders had never happened.

None of that would work were the actors not all-in with this unusual approach. Amaia Naima Aguinaga is perfectly cast as Mia, wide-eyed at first, then worried, then left with nowhere to go, she is the little sister, the lover and the mother all at once and conveys it at such close quarters that we can see everything in her eyes.

James Wilbraham is a revelation as Simon, taking what could be a generic role and investing it with a tragic humanity, with a furious energy and pitiful enervation, with dreams and despair. In some scenes, he barely acts at all and, were it clipped, you'd say "What's so impressive about that?". But in those moments, you could feel the tension in the house - so much was being said by saying nothing.

Theatre is alchemy, but not the impossible kind. You can have all the right ingredients and mix them in the right quantities and produce something shiny - but to spin gold, you need something indefinable. The reviewer can't quite explain what that is and I doubt theatremakers can either. But when it's there, you see it - and it's there in Ikaria.

Ikaria is at the Old Red Lion until 19 November

Photo Credit: Tristam Kenton

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