REVIEW: CANDY at The White Bear Theatre 3 - 14 June 2025
'Sure to score a hit with audiences' ★★★★
Two fresh-faced Ozzies are smitten with each other. Candy (Freya James) and Dan (Ed McVey, who played Prince William in The Crown) could be straight out of Neighbours. Cute, cool, and carefree, this could be Kylie and Jason, Gen Z style. But sweet as the title of this play is, which starts with tenderness, intimacy, and lots of artful canoodling, don’t be deceived. This is a play about heroin, how it finds its way into people’s lives, what it does to individuals and how it affects relationships.
Dynamically directed and choreographed by Kate Elliott who worked on the adaptation of the novel with Freya James, Candy is a combination of direct address and scenes that trace the arc of this chemically challenged relationship. The 75 minutes running time flies by, always the sign of a production that is tight, focused and absorbing, as you are drawn into this sensory world, based in 1980s Sydney and Melbourne, Australia
Dan is pure surf boy, tanned with floppy blonde fringe. Candy is a quirky artist, blue eyes “like a mist,” open-minded and up for new experiences. He’s a regular user; she wants to try it, just a tiny bit. Initially, he’s reluctant but eventually they become joint users, on a mind-bending journey together. This menage a trois, with heroin as the third party, soon spirals, as the drug exerts ever greater control.
The use of sound and music is sometimes stripped back, and single notes set an audio framework for shifting emotions and needs. From “indescribable bliss” to desperate need, audiences experience a full gamut of emotion, from the heady peaks, to the dismal, humiliating troughs. Despite the growing dominance of the drug, the couple still have dreams. They hope for children. He wants to grow vegetables and keep chickens; she wants to paint. But heroin has other ideas.
With a great rapport and two great, physical performances, the actors manage lots of entertaining multi-roling and some hilarious vignettes including a drug-addled, ‘four-way’ and dinner with her parents. You can’t, even against your better judgement, help but fall for these two hopelessly inter-dependent junkies.
Based on the 1997 novel by Luke Davies, Candy: A Novel of Love and Addiction, the story was also turned into a 2006 film with Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish. This stage version, the second run, last seen at the Old Red Lion in 2024, doesn’t fall into any of the depressing tropes associated with heroin stories and refuses to moralise, sermonise, or demonise. Heroin is a fact of many lives and this little window, joyous in its own subversive way, offers more empathy than judgement.
CANDY, a stage adaptation of Luke Davies’ novel Candy: A Novel of Love and Addiction
White Bear Theatre
3rd - 14th June
Directed and choreographed by Kate Elliott who worked on the adaptation of the novel with Freya James
Cast
Freya James and Ed McVey
