REVIEW: Game Play by R.K Chui at Jack Studio Theatre 3 – 7 June 2025
‘Undercooked and underdeveloped’ ★★
Love and theatre can both be messy. At their best, they can lead to wild, unpredictable and exciting encounters – at their worst you’ll wonder why you ever came in the first place. Game Play, by R.K. Chui, is unfortunately more illustrative of this latter tendency than the former.
Things kick off with strong energy as our protagonist duo Izzy (Hayley Calleia) and Dom (Sam Law) fire themselves up with a gym workout before recounting the first date that kicked off their relationship. Filled to the brim with karaoke, to which both Calleia and Law give some very high energy lip-syncing, we jump in time almost immediately to the couple having moved in together and become thoroughly bored of each other. It’s a whiplash that glosses over the development of much-needed substance for a relationship that should be the heart of the play.
Things don’t get much better as the issues in the relationship become clear – Dom is seeing other women, with the consent of a highly tortured Izzy. Suspicions that there may be more going on than it seems are fueled by Dom’s bizarre referral to Izzy as ‘holographic’, but this proves to be a red-herring for what is in fact a very straightforward and arbitrary dynamic between the two, one that plays into the ‘games’ of the title but again without much-needed substance. Many things in the play simply happen, without build-up or justification.
Direction from Aoife Scott does well to inject pace and energy into proceedings, and the hour does fly by, but there’s only so much that can be done with flawed material. In particular, the pace and sense of the play is disrupted by regular fourth wall breaks in which Calleia/Law grab a microphone to either justify themselves or simply antagonize the audience. A handful of times these instances are funny, but far more often they only work to suck the oxygen out the room and undermine any tension or drama that had been built up to that point.
Crucially, during the play’s climax as the couple’s problems seem too great to overcome and Law leaves, there is a quiet moment of sadness only for him to return citing that the director has told him to. So much for world of the play – it’s a baffling and self-defeating story beat that doesn’t do the show any credit and epitomizes just how undercooked the fundamentals are. While there’s plenty of talent on display, significant revision in the writing is needed before any of that same talent can shine here.
Photography by Ross Kernahan
Game Play runs at Brockley Jack from 3rd – 7th June
Written by R.K Chui
Directed by Aoife Scott
Produced by Hayley Calleia
Lighting and Tech by Darwin Hennessy
Box office: https://brockleyjack.co.uk/jackstudio-entry/game-play/
Produced by Kitchen Revolt Productions
Reviewed by Harry Conway
