FringeReview UK 2024

A Chat With Adonai

Roger Francis and Bitesize Festival

Genre: Comedy, Contemporary, Drama, Fringe Theatre, New Writing, Short Plays, Theatre

Venue: Riverside Studios

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

Does Godot speak? Bitesize Festival at the Riverside Studios continues with Roger Francis’ A Chat With Adonai: which suggests it’s not only possible, but we’ve all spoken with them.

“Hello and thank you for reaching out to The Big Other. Your call is extremely important to me, but I’m tremendously busy at the moment.” And you wonder if you even exist. “Toby or not Toby.” There’s the rub for Toby Dasein (Jacob Kay), calling the universe because he’s terminally unhappy, hangdog and doesn’t even know how to sit down; till he does.

Riverside Studio 3 seating towers over the simple chair: Kay’s pacing round it as if stalking his own grave tethered for an eternity of holding patterns. This isn’t a one-person Godot though, which might prove intolerable.

Indeed Francis who writes, directs and produces his own debut with some aplomb, dares to stretch out that on-hold initially to lengths that would ty the patience of Vladimir and Estragon combined.

He and Kay know exactly what they’re doing, though it might be telegraphed by a few more light-dims. These later happily arrive to telescope what happens into 40 minutes of angst, repeat and interrogate, because this play doesn’t circle round a single actor.

That might be a reveal, but this is a two-hander and the voice, Adonai and the Doctor (Helen Baird) suddenly apparates as Kay’s Toby seems poised to end it all with a bare bottle of tablets.

Toby’s dissatisfaction with advice given, the world of capital that designs him (there’s a clear pun, dare I say it a Hegelian one, of being thought or designed) as a consumer of products, not so much a machine for living as wasting. No matter how conscientiously Toby recycles, it all ends in Malaysian infill. There’s no sense here by capital that they’re wasting the planet and now the planet will waste them.

Francis moves from angsty frustrated actor with a touch of Stoppardian futility (his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern also tracing back to Beckett) to something confrontational and full-fat-polemic. It’s dangerous but in fact funny, and the end breaking the fourth wall managed with theatrical brio and bracing ending.

What happens in between is a critique of pure consumption, delivered as a paean to it. Toby hopelessly reasons with the implacably cheerful Doctor who’s saved him that there must be some virtue in attempting a life as it were.

But using a shark metaphor (the shark end of the argument) Toby’s told exactly where he belongs. Consuming is a vocation: with most producing being taken over by AI there’s a surplus waiting. Nevertheless at the moment … Francis’ Doctor ends with a stinging hymn to the mass-production of useless objects, a comically frightful end to the universe with a black hole of production, capital suck and swallow collapsing like a red giant and white dwarf (not analogues Francis uses, but ones suggesting his destination).

Meanwhile the Doctor adds an umbrella hat, pitches advertisements and prepares structurally for the denouement.

Kay and Baird are both exemplary and funny – there’s explosions of laughter. At 40 minutes there’s much matter hurled at the speed of dark. There’s possibly some compression to introduce early on, and Francis could develop this to a full 50-60-minute Fringe tour with a tweak of conflict and reveal.

An auspicious debut by a writer who knows exactly what he wants and how to pitch it, as it were. See it if you can, and check out the other Bitesize plays at Riverside.

Published February 2, 2024 by Simon Jenner