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The Orange Tree Theatre is not Communist Russia, so there should come a time when not every review of work there starts with a denunciation of the previous regime.
Nonetheless, anybody who experienced the chintzy final years of founder artistic director Sam Walters’ 42-year reign will find themselves again gobsmacked by what his successor Paul Miller has done to the place with ‘Buckets’. Or as it’s styled – look away now Sam – ‘buckets’.
Adam Barnard’s debut isn’t in the same league as the mad, brilliant ‘Pomona’, the show that announced the dawning of the Miller era so seismically last year. But it’s just as much a break from the polite period dramas of yore. Closer in its DNA to Nick Payne’s ‘Blurred Lines’ and Caryl Churchill’s ‘Love + Information’ than anything that’s played in this neck of the woods of late, ‘Buckets’ is a freewheeling series of vignettes on the subject of death that are fired out with gusto by director Rania Jumaily, a cast of six, and a charmingly superfluous community choir who wander on every now and again.
At its best it’s either poignant – the mother scolding her child for not living long enough to be told off for doing anything naughty – or has a winningly absurdist sense of humour: a man who enters the afterlife is given an official final score; another man is made to agree to a complicated series of terms and conditions before being born.
At its worst, it comes across like a hit-and-miss sketch show with a high opinion of itself, and perhaps its biggest flaw is that it doesn’t feel like Barnard has anything to say about death as a whole, he’s just riffing on a theme.
But it’s an exuberant, likeable and snappy 80 minutes, with a striking playground-style set from James Turner and fine performances all round. Toss in the likelihood it’ll make you feel vaguely better about your own mortality – and Lord knows that’s something the more, er, ‘loyal’ members of the Orange Tree audience might need – and you’d have to be quite the grump to want to kick ‘Buckets’.