Ticking

Some shows make you clock-watch with the desperation of Bart Simpson, his eyes glued to an elastic second hand as he languishes in school detention. This turgid new play from writer and director Paul Andrew Williams is one of them, detaining us on a Chinese death row with a rich white kid who’s so astonishingly obnoxious that it’s hard not to will the hour of his demise forward.

The play’s one-room, real-time setting would normally be an excuse for some cabin-fever thrills. But instead, condemned twentysomething Simon spends his final hour on earth raking through his visiting parents’ leafy Home Counties past in a kind of bizarre Freudian clean-up session. Simon’s Chinese prison guard is never allowed to speak, and the world beyond the prison walls is only glimpsed through the family’s mildly xenophobic sallies. When the merest scrap of plot detail appears, it clatters into the empty concrete blankness like a lunch tray shoved through a prison door.

Williams wrote and directed 2006 Britflick ‘London to Brighton’, and its award-winning sheen has helped him imprison a brilliant cast. ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ star Anthony Head is dignified as a cricket-playing Dad who can’t understand his ne’er-do-well son. Niamh Cusack is a painfully malfunctioning Stepford wife, wound up then left to scream. And Tom Hughes gives horrid concoction Simon a kind of manic, nice-guy energy – you can almost see the halo of a lost fedora.

But Williams’s complete inexperience in both writing and directing for the stage shows. Even with our eyes on the starry cast, we can’t escape purgatory.

BY: ALICE SAVILLE