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Invincible
Birmingham Rep Studio
***** TORBEN Betts is an incredible new writer. His
script is fresh and delves right into the heart of what theatre aims to
explore and discuss. He is of his time and
gives a representation of everyone’s social attitudes today. With the
slick direction from Christopher Harper,
Invincible becomes a raucous evening
looking in between the lines of socialism and talking the issue of class
head on. Betts’ current piece is a literal representation
of what we see in in the
Emily and Oliver are used to comfortable London
living. As a compromise to Emily’s hard socialist views, a move away
from their privileged and easy-going habitation was the best thing to do
in order to live with ‘real people.’
The action takes place in their sophisticated and
extremely tidy looking living room. As a gesture to get to know their
neighbours, Emily and Oliver invite their neighbours around for the
evening which turns out to be a night fuelled with olives and
pistachios, but lacking alcohol. When Dawn and Alan arrive to the pitiful house
party, Emily and Oliver are shocked but the audience howl with laughter.
It is hard to believe that two polar opposites can be alone in the same
room together for an entire evening, but this conflict and social clash
makes way for a hilarious outcome. While Emily is modestly dressed in a long shirt
that she made herself, Dawn shows up in bright pink heels and an even
brighter red dress. Alan however did not arrive at the same time as
Dawn. The England match was still playing and he could not possibly turn
up until it was finished. When Alan did eventually arrive, we saw a
cuddly bear dressed in a gloriously patriotic kit of the English
football team, after an ironic conversation as Emily and Oliver were
discussing how much they hated country flags hanging outside people’s
houses. Black outs were used to show Dawn and Alan’s arrival which
surprised us with larger than life images. The audience see each couple’s judgemental
reactions in a blatantly obvious manner, but the characters hide behind
social niceties for their opinion’s to actually be said in the open.
This is what makes Betts’ script so delightful to watch. The audience
can relate to an encounter with someone so totally unlike themselves,
and Betts reflects our feelings back to us through the couple’s
interactions. The first half of the play is gloriously funny,
seeing the couples getting to know each other and bonding over Emily and
Alan’s shared love of painting. We saw a scratching of the surface in
the first half, laughing at their quirks and individual thoughts. The
second half is also beautifully done, helped by Betts’ script that
contained nothing but high stakes and nail biting scenes. Their union
comes with the dreadful emotion of grief, each couple having lost a
child, through different circumstances.
The excellent cast do well to allow the audience
to see the effects of social change that is happening right now. Dawn is
played by Kerry Bennet who is the embodiment of the people who have seen
the hardest shift in governmental change. Playing the part-time
receptionist and mother to a child she had as a teenager; Bennet gives a
down-to-earth performance and is the character we learn the most from.
Alan embodies the majority. A classic man you’re likely to meet in the
pub, it seems that nothing can change his jolliness and love for life
and family. Struggling as a postman, Alan keeps the hope that
as long as he has Dawn, his life could not be better. Graeme Brookes is
surprisingly a local actor hailing from Walsall, but his mastery of the
Northern accent has the audience thinking otherwise. There is truly
nobody better to play the loving and open Alan, which makes the play
harder to watch as we see his fall during the second act. Bookes is the
heart of the humour. The strong and feisty Emily is played by Emily
Bowker and nothing will stand in the way of her well informed opinions.
Emily makes her voice heard and is often misunderstood by everyone else,
especially her husband Oliver. Bowker is a fantastic Emily and although
we see her reservations to begin with, Bowker shows the utter despair of
a woman in grief and reveals what is underneath the hard exterior in a
beautiful manner. Alastair Whatley embodies the bumbling middle
class Oliver with equal excellence. As a man who prefers cricket to
football and a million miles apart from Alan, we see him finally speak
up and break out behind the shadow of his opinionated wife by the end of
the play. Betts poses the query that although we may see
the struggle of others outside of our social realm and indeed empathise,
we will never truly understand what it is to live in their social
category, no matter how much we are willing to learn. With great actors
and a strikingly beautiful set, Betts shows us that class is a structure
that will never leave us. In the programme, he states ‘I bet you a
tenner you know someone just like Alan, Dawn, Emily or Oliver. Are you
like one of them?’ To 21-05-16. Elizabeth Halpin 18-05-16
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world around us. With austerity and bleak
politics, it is clear that the divide between rich and poor is becoming
more prevalent within our culture. Betts literally splits the class
divide in half in this production and shows us the lives of Emily,
Oliver, Dawn and Alan. The story is set in a quiet and friendly street
in the North of England, although this would have been fabulous set in
Birmingham in conjunction with a Midlands audience.