REVIEW: FEBRUARY FACE by Keelan Kember at Old Red Lion Theatre 14 - 18 November 2023

‘This is a fine, sensitive, significant piece. Writer, director, and two actors doing excellent work that merits a wider airing.’ ★★★★

A seriously funny, funnily serious examination of single life; banter, self-medicating with alcohol, falling in love, and being a complete knob-head who can’t get out of his own way. Keelan Kember has written an excellent play about Ed, a single young man-about-town cutting a swathe through available sexual partners because he’s pretty and funny and quite engagingly weird. Then he meets Lily, who has baggage, and engages in serious relating until the thought of serious relationships send him back to getting drunk with his mates and getting laid without commitment.

It's a two hander with a bunch of uncredited but very nicely played voice-overs, (unless the voice-overs are by Keelan Kember, in which case Respect and Silly Me) so that Kember can have dialogue with invisible friends and with the awful voice inside his head. Because really, this place isn’t about laddishness and banter, it’s about depression and mental illness, and most pointedly it’s about how much harder it is to deal with those conditions if you insist on ‘manning up’ and refuse to admit, to yourself or to anyone, how scared you are. Lily nearly gets through to him, but that closeness is so scary he pushes her away.

It is a very nicely judged, very tautly written examination of a very real problem, and it’s pacy and it’s funny. That’s a good set of virtues. Olivia Mills gives a great deal of nuance and warmth to Lily, the only other actor present, and she deals very handily with being a slightly under-written ideal. Her character has lots of warmth and some admirably tart lines, but her character remains a bit of a cipher, more someone for Ed to idealise than an independent person. We never see her on her own, talking to her own friends, her own doubts and demons, and the play would have more resonance if her character was more fully realised.

But that’s nit-picking. This is a fine, sensitive, significant piece. Writer, director, and two actors doing excellent work that merits a wider airing. And possibly one really nice chair.  

FEBRUARY FACE

written by Keelan Kember,

directed by Monica Cox

At Old Red Lion Theatre, Islington

14th-18th November, 2023 | 7:30pm

Box Office: https://www.oldredliontheatre.co.uk/february-face.html

Cast: Keelan Kember, Oliva Mills

Reviewed by Chris Lilly