REVIEW: The Play with Speeches at Upstairs at the Gatehouse until 18 June 2023

‘a good-natured romp, it is energetic and lands lots of jokes’ ★★★

James Woolf’s well-crafted but fundamentally pretty silly jeu d’esprit, ‘The Play With Speeches’, is having an outing in Highgate. It’s a play-within-a-play that uses meta-theatre as a game rather than a tool for revelation, and it depends heavily on Matthew Parker’s scene-stealing, scenery-chewing performance as An-TH-ony, playwright, producer, jilted lover.

The set-up is that a recently estranged couple are yoked together to audition a bunch of actors for their up-coming production, written by Anthony and directed by his ex, Penny (Katherine Reilly). A sequence of actors come on, do a bit, and then go away, though some of them go away more than others. Anthony regales his accidental audience with plot points and, with increasing bitterness, the collapse of his relationship. It reflects on theatrical tropes, but it isn’t an attempt to analyse them, it’s done for fun.

The problem with this production is two-fold. First, there was competition for the most chewed scenery. Mr. Parker starts off OTT and gets bigger, and a fair swathe of the cast try to follow him up there. This makes the whole show a bit shouty, a bit show-offy, and that makes it less funny. The second problem is the casting of the co-directors as actors, particularly Katherine Reilly as Anthony’s other half. The performance is low-key, which is a relief, but rather too hesitant to offset the Big Acting, and too subdued to give Mr. Parker much to play against.

It remains a good-natured romp, it is energetic and lands lots of jokes, but it is maybe a bit self-consciously comic. Being self-consciously comic serves most shows very well, so this curmudgeonly response is probably an outlier, but a touch more restraint might provide some welcome contrast to the big moments, and a touch more naturalism might help to offset the scenery-shredding.

Olive and Stavros present

THE PLAY WITH SPEECHES

by James Woolf

Upstairs at the Gatehouse

15 – 18 Jun 2023

https://www.upstairsatthegatehouse.com/

Directed by Ursula Campbell and Katherine Reilly

Cast: Matthew Parker, Katherine Reilly, Joshua Jewkes, Mark Parsons, Mayuresh Mishra, Anna Blackburn, Camilia O’Grady, Ursula Campbell, Michael Perlmutter.

Reviewed by Chris Lilly