FringeReview UK 2024

The Pursuit of Joy

Footprints Festival, Jermyn Street Theatre

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

Venue: Jermyn Street Theatre

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

Jermyn Street Theatre’s Footprints Festival of six new plays continues with a three-hander, Safaa Benson-Effiom’s The Pursuit of Joy. Directed by Brigitte Adela it’s a gentle heart-warming trot around South America and the aspirations of thirty-somethings Ardel, Joan and Iona.

Three strangers on an archetypal quest for self-discovery and escape –they meet at arrivals before the 2349 mile journey around Peru, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil to meet their past and future coming back.

Co-created by Soho Six’s Safaa Benson-Effiom (Til Death Do Us Part, Theatre 503) and Brigitte Adela (Wakes, The Bunker), The Pursuit of Joy owns something of the sweetness of early John Godber. Each of the characters is burdened – backpacked rather –  by the past: two of them particularly by very different relationships with their parents.

We immediately identify with knowledgeable almost geeky Iona (Antonia Layiwola) with an internal saboteur of a monologue thwarting every happy moment she finds in a voiceover: we soon realise where this comes from. Layiwola gradually emerges from Iona’s near-aphasia and tongue-tied hesitation, through desperate fun facts from her Rough Guide, through to gentle authority. Alone of the group, Iona’s most conscious of what she needs to do, what’s offered, yet the most crippled by the past.

Joan (Tia Dunn, who briefly takes the role of Iona’s mother) has a name almost the acronym of Iona (and visa-versa) and seems indeed Iona’s inside-out wannabe. Dunn riffs Joan’s almost ADHD persona, skittering through life talking of her dad’s bucket-list and how she’s doing it all for her parents because they can’t be bothered to themselves (we briefly meet them too, played by the other actors).

A portrait of a smashed-avo lover smashing every ism out of the court, Dunn’s splinteringly accurate take on a restless extrovert suddenly reveals gulphs of what drives her: beyond the comedy of someone taking up then dropping everything (like meditation), with occasional flings along the way. So why has Joan never even left her home, never seen the sea, let alone flown (climate catastrophe’s not broached)?

Ardel (Razak Osman) a warm-hearted but phone-obsessed youngish man provides a tantrum and crisis in Uruguay Cathedral – losing his phone as he thinks, his cool deserts him: he swears like a child. But Ardel also gently insists on teaching Iona to dance (occasioning a crisis in her internal saboteur). A tacit relationship emerges – indeed Joan sometimes vies for his attention. Osman makes something engaging of a man whose one reveal is to be briefly untrue to himself and his friends.

There is another crisis, releasing a missing depth – of course there all along. Don’t expect anything devastating in this 75 minutes; but allow a renewal of joy and the occasions for snatching it.

Catja Hamilton’s lighting (overall Festival lighting Laura Howard) plays engagingly on Festival designer Natalie Johnson’s set background for The Good John Proctor (a thing of gables against blue), Emily Rose Simons’ sound purrs discreetly throughout, like a background wash. It’s captioned via The Difference Engine for those who use it on their Apps.

There’s a delicious moment when all three gradually embrace warm rain and abandon their umbrellas. Another when they throw objects about. It’s a playful, slight but absolutely authentic slice of travel living. “It’s like a solar eclipse in reverse. The darkness momentarily pierced by a shining bright light…” Not a bad metaphor for this bright tale on how you meet your own darkness coming back to meet you, and how with the right friends you somehow pierce that and find homecoming brighter than you imagined.

Published January 18, 2024 by Simon Jenner