REVIEW: Sing, River at The Hope Theatre, 27 June – 8 July 2023

‘intellectually intriguing without being completely emotionally satisfying’ ★★★

Set on a riverbed and structured around the description of a collection of seemingly incongruous objects, this play promises an eventual death, or at least some kind of tragedy, by the time the sun rises on Midsummer. Though the promised horror never quite materializes, at least in the form we are led to expect, this play is effective in building a kind of slow, sad dread – or maybe expectation more than dread– in the audience. It’s structured, somewhat unusually, around not conflict but the question of what has been lost: memories, objects, connections to other people. This felt intellectually intriguing without being completely emotionally satisfying.

That said, I was always curious about where the play would go and there were moments of real unease in the strangeness of the setting and the main character’s (played by Nathaniel Jones) shifts between chatting inconsequentially, prophesying impending doom, and singing original folksongs. Some moments within the seemingly inconsequential chatter stood out as very funny, such as when Jones’s character claimed not to want to go on about his love life before proceeding to do just that, or criticized the music of Ed Sheeran. But I kept feeling, like the character in the play, that something was missing.

Sing, River by Nathaniel Jones

The Hope Theatre, 27 June – 8 July

https://www.thehopetheatre.com/productions/sing-river/

Writer: Nathaniel Jones

Director: Katie Kirkpatrick

Cast: Nathaniel Jones

Reviewer Clio Doyle is a playwright and university lecturer.