Review: TRANSGRESSION, White Bear Theatre

Transgression - it’s an enticing title. To transgress is one of life’s more delicious ways to spend time. The thrill of challenging authority, of stepping out of one’s comfort zone or (and YouTube is full of examples) of defying gravity itself comprises a trio of delights that might tempt a saint. And there hangs the problem - temptation seldom comes cost-free and it’s the price that’s paid which is the focus of Loretta Monaco’s play.

It’s the mid-90s (so no mobiles, no computers) in a North London psychotherapy surgery, where the marriage of the couple who share it (Hannah and Tom) is falling apart. Their son (Graham) manages to blame both his philandering father and passive mother, but is pretty much a chip off the old block himself, as he demonstrates when he meets Addie, his father’s lover, and sets up a kind of ménage-a-quatre. To nobody’s surprise, things don’t end well.

Nor, alas, does the play, as it collapses under the weight of its own dramatic and technical shortcomings. 

The episodic structure - characters keep walking into rooms, often to the surprise of the occupants - makes it hard to get close to the men and women we meet. The speeches feel awkward, stilted, not what one might hear from real people, which gives the actors difficulties they never overcome. 

Abigail Moore fares best as the much put upon Hannah, wrestling with two impossible men - Jonathan Hansler and Bruce Allinson are trapped in caricatures - but it’s hard to believe that a woman who has carved out a self-employed career successful enough to suggest a trip to the Royal Opera House on a whim, could be so helpless in the face of such bullying. 

Alexandra Etudor is required to swing from one mood to another so rapidly that we never get to know how Addie got where she is or where she’s going, literally or metaphorically. Zara Hadeshian cannot make much of Susan, Hannah’s analysand, whose main function appears to be a vehicle to drive home the theme that motherhood has both a seductive pull but also a destructive danger.

That theme, the complexity of being a ‘good enough’ mother, overwhelms the action. One soon realises that the play is more concerned with building an argument than building people, provoking a stream of interruptions as irritating as those Tom and Graham frequently make when Hannah or Addie are speaking. Though the travails of parenthood within the patriarchy are always with us, it’s a strange decision to set the play a quarter century in the past, as the landscape that faces today’s parents is very different to that of a full generation earlier.

Transgression is a strange play, one that may tap into the always popular sub-genre of comforting misery, qv Eastenders. I would have been more positively disposed to the production if there was somebody to like, somebody to root for in the messy lives we see, but redeeming features are in short supply. It’s a plea for just a little more of the joy we glimpse when Graham and Addie do something they really shouldn’t, but can’t really resist. But we’re soon back excavating the price they’ve paid, the unhappiness spreading from stage to stalls like dry ice - and just as chilling.    

Transgression at the White Bear Theatre until 27 January

Photo Credits: Carnyx Productions 

  

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