The Flick
Reginald Theatre, April 7, until April 21
★★★★½
This is dangerous theatre. You feel it testing your responses, stamina, patience and involvement. It's asking you to enter into a pact: if you accept that a play which could have lasted two hours is going to last three, you will be rewarded with infinitely finer veins of meaning and the time to absorb them. It's like music: you could speed up the tempi of Bach's Mass in B Minor, but to no end other than getting out the door sooner.
Justin Amankwah makes an extraordinary debut.
Annie Baker's play takes Beckett's experiments with pauses and applies them to naturalism. How long, she asks, is a silence? At what point does silence cease to increase tension and start to diffuse it? If you have a play that, amid a deluge of thematic concerns, is partially about miscommunication and non-communication, what happens if we actually witness that, rather than the accelerated, theatrical, audience-friendly version?
To see The Flick in the same week as STC's strong production of Lucy Kirkwood's The Children is to realise that whereas Kirkwood writes juicy roles for good actors, Baker (her contemporary) writes transformative drama-comedy. This is work that seeps into your bones and haunts you thereafter, twisting from a mania for cinema to unrequited love; from subtle racism to glacially slow-moving workplace politics of envy, gratitude and resentment.
A major work, it is intimate, tender, devastating, funny, infuriating and oh-so finely observed, and, once again, the commendably consistent Outhouse Theatre has done Baker proud. Director Craig Baldwin has trusted his brilliant cast to make the sometimes aching pace work, and they have repaid that trust a hundredfold.
