FringeReview UK 2024

Storming!

Gail Louw’s International Season of four plays at the Playground Theatre concludes with Storming! Like Rika’s Rooms and last year’s The Good Dad, it’s directed by Anthony Shrubsall. It here receives its world premiere after a rehearsed reading at Jermyn Street in June 2022 with the same director and principal actor Chris Barritt reprising the role. Already deeply impressive, his performance is now phenomenal.

Genre: Biographical Drama, Drama, Fringe Theatre, Historical, New Writing, Theatre

Venue: The Playground Theatre, Latimer Road W10 6RQ

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

A middle-aged man – Rusty Weston – sits as a woman arrives and berates him: “Hello Rusty. Thought I’d left you for a bit, did you?” When David arrives addressing him formally the woman urges Rusty Weston to “act normal”. Which might mean not recognising she’s there, since Dr David Gordon certainly doesn’t.

Gail Louw’s International Season of four plays at the Playground Theatre concludes with Storming! Like Rika’s Rooms and last year’s The Good Dad, it’s directed by Anthony Shrubsall till April 7^th.

It here receives its world premiere after a rehearsed reading at Jermyn Street in June 2022 with the same director and principal actor Chris Barritt reprising the role. Already deeply impressive, his performance is now phenomenal.

Like all four Louw plays this season. Storming! is based on truth. A real Rusty Weston beat Trump to it and stormed the Capitol on July 24^th 1998, single-handed mind you, resulting in fatalities: two policemen. And in late 2000 a  psychiatrist did indeed assess whether he should be made to take meds involuntarily which could result in him being fit to stand trial.

Weston’s life literally hangs on that. Fit, he’ll fry; unfit, he’ll languish incarcerated for life. Some choice. Nominally 44, he looks older.  There might be a reason.

Weston claims he’s a clone. Dolly the Sheep’s not long been cloned, but there’s unethical noises off from China through places closer to home. So clearly this is his illness talking.

Not the Woman though (Bu Kunene). She’s full of insults. “Look at him. He’s young and gorgeous. It’s a shame you’re so, ugly!” But then Weston turns on the doctor. “I know who you are… I know what you are… we’re the same” and bit by bit he unsettles David (Edmund Sage-Green).

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you make a wrong judgement call. Except killing policemen.

Barritt puts in two performances, one for each act: the shuffling, shambling wreck of a human being, who’s avoided anti-psychotics, a twitching imaginary-person-talking patient, continually distracted: eyes-dilated, unfocusing as he spots something else in the corner.

Despite this, the anti-Semitic jibes, and his Constitutional outbursts, there’s shafts of deadly accuracy David finds unsettling.

When the Woman returns a year later in Act Two David immediately both sees and recognises her: Dr Annie Marshall (Kunene again, naturally), now a Treating Psychiatrist.

She’s appalled but tries not to show it. David’s aged ten years in just one. Sage-Green’s now greyish hair and broken gait, that limp, all bespeak a man in rapid physical decline.

In Act Two, Sage-Green undoubtedly gains power from projecting frailty. Just as Barritt’s Weston has regained clarity and composure, a measure of truculence on his new meds: which he’s just come off. There’s a cusp of awareness that’s about to be breached. Weston’s preternatural shrewdness, his ability to spot relationships and his intelligence-gathering seems psychic. Can he maintain this awareness?

Annie and David have previous, and now married to a fry ‘em Senator Bob Willis, she takes the establishment view that most people are so friable.

Why did David break things off? Which made Annie rush to Alaska for career research, just so as to avoid him? And marry a hard-liner, as well as recommend a hard-line psychiatrist to decide on Weston, in Barritt’s terraced watchfully sly reading of a man who knows he holds cards.

As Weston manipulates the former lovers whose feelings for each other are still so intense, Annie’s half-recognition about ‘what’ David might be emerges.

Annie never quite gets anti-Semitism either. David just reports it. “Anti-Semitic sentiments creeping in. You Jews, type of thing.” “You Jews?” she asks.

And Annie’s baffled as to how this insulting schizo-affective Weston might hold the truth she never recognizes. One that shocks her into an appalling action.

Kunene’s svelte, judgemental Annie is armoured against more than Weston, despite flinched moments of tenderness towards Sage-Green’s urbane, liberal, seemingly resigned David; a man both painfully attracted yet rejecting.

Annie, at war with the self she’s chosen faux de mieux, and being pulled back to a man crumbling before her, finally lashes out into a double-betraying monologue at the end.

To Sage-Green’s anguished yet quiet authority Kunene edges up to the pain of Annie’s rejection and even more appalled, why David had to reject her. There’s much Annie can never get. “A Rabbi, why a Rabbi, what’s he got to do with it?” she asks aghast at a new revelation. Weston gloats.

Male Arlucci’s set design is simple: a table, three chairs and a realistic worn sage-green/cream backdrop with rust-points indicating a dilapidated psychiatric unit. A door might have helped dramatically. Wally Sewell’s sound works with Chuma Emembolu’s lighting, when it involves powerful video-projection.

The first image is the Capitol then footage from the 1998 shooting. The last, January 20^th 2021 preludes a brilliant theatrical coup not there originally. It’s a clincher that nails this 110-minute play.

There’s just one nagging opportunity, even coup that might be taken at the end of Act One: about the identity of the Woman omnipresent during that act and occasionally thereafter: around the time Dr Annie Marshall enters Weston’s life, though currently we don’t see that.

Since she’s also played by Kunene, tightening this might even further play into one of Louw’s edgy three-way fights. In its sinewy reveals, ambushes and volte-faces it recalls Louw’s masterly The Ice-Cream Boys, themed around Jacob Zuma and played at Jermyn Street to acclaim in September 2019.

Louw’s depiction of psychotic behaviour and presentation is flinchingly real, to anyone who’s witnessed it; and this is an authoritative study not only in psychosis but the broader American malaise, and how they dovetail. It’s the American nightmare.

Structurally, Act One seems just a tad too long, circling its material, but that’s to judge by the finest margin and seeing another performance might dispel it. Act Two compels absolutely.

Barritt is sovereign and gives one of the most riveting performances of psychosis I’ve seen, full of sly knowingness and a hint that he holds the key to more, however irrational that might at first appear. It cusps the uncanny. Kunene and Sage-Green render characters that not only reflect their own doubleness, but glint in refraction to Barritt and grow.

Keenly directed by Anthony Shrubsall, it bears relation  – but only that – to another play Louw’s had performed and published (it’s in Volume Three of her Oberon Collected Plays): A Life Twice Given. Storming! though stands alone, a wholly original twist to a growing alarm-bell of ethics.

Published March 30, 2024March 31, 2024 by Simon Jenner