FringeReview UK 2024
The Comeuppance
Almeida Theatre
Genre: American Theater, Dark Comedy, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Short Plays, Theatre
Venue: Almeida Theatre
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
“People have a tendency to see me once and try hard to forget it ever happened – though that never works – not for very long.” Maryland autumn 2022. Four millennials meet up prior to their school year’s 20th reunion. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ The Comeuppance opens at the Almeida directed by Eric Ting till May 18th.
The quartet’s mockingly self-identifying too: MERG(E) (multi-ethnic reject group “with a soft G”). Another’s just cancelled, though we hear from him later. But a fifth will turn up, and a sixth thoughtfully already has: Death.
Whilst not quite sure this all ands squarely, it’s engrossing, profound and with a flicker of Chekhovian humour and misunderstanding, might prove the most lasting American drama about. emerging to a different world.
Writer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Director Eric Ting, Set Designer & Costume Designer Arnulfo Maldonado, Lighting Designer Natasha Chivers, Sound Designer Emma Laxton, Magic &v Visual Effects Designers Skylar Fox and Will Houstoun,
Casting Director Jatinder Chera, Movement & Intimacy Director Asha Jennings-Grant, Dialect Coach Rebecca Clark Carey, Assistant Director Dubheasa Lanipekun
Till May 18th
Review
“People have a tendency to see me once and try hard to forget it ever happened – though that never works – not for very long.” Maryland autumn 2022. Four millennials meet up prior to their school year’s 20th reunion. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ The Comeuppance opens at the Almeida directed by Eric Ting till May 18th.
The quartet’s mockingly self-identifying too: MERG(E) (multi-ethnic reject group “with a soft G”). Another’s just cancelled, though we hear from him later. But a fifth will turn up, and a sixth thoughtfully already has: Death.
Premiered in 2023, writer, director and designer – Arnulfo Maldonado – are able to enjoy fresh effects with a British cast in this carefully-paced production.
Jacobs-Jenkins sometimes disturbs the surfaces of his naturalistic-seeming plays with theatrical playfulness as in An Octoroon, or in Appropriate, spooks the very furniture.
To Natasha Chivers’ spectral lighting and voice reverb, Death inhabits each character from the start, confiding they’re here on business. The actor speaks in their own British voice, bringing a Puckishly confiding tang to Death.
Jacobs-Jenkins plays with this disruption so you might speculate whom Death’s collecting, but otherwise it grants a perspective on not simply the pandemic, but how disruptions (in the sociologist Mannheim’s sense) mark a generation: 9/11 before they graduated, wars, January 6th, Covid – a graphic description’s given by the doctor, placing dead colleagues in refrigerator vans. It’s not – emphatically – that they’ve had it worse. But nearing 40, it’s the last time to look at paths not taken and rethink.
Ting expands silences yet allows dialogue to accelerate; lots of it. There’s an enveloping warmth, aided by Maldonado’s angled porch, fronting a house with fully-built, lit interiors, even an arriving taxi in the gloom (Chivers again).
It reinforces how Jacobs-Jenkins’ detailing backstories unfold naturally: you want to know how each character will realise themselves through five flawless performances. So The Comeuppance seems in the best sense longer than its two hours straight through.
Seraphically calm Ursula (Tamara Lawrance) is hosting and declares she’s staying put too. She’s lost an eye through diabetes and everyone quietly comments on her eye-patch, but Ursula remains elusive save, finally, to Emilio (Anthony Welsh). He’s the Internationally successful installation artist who arrives early from Berlin with photos of his baby.
Caitlin (Yolanda Kettle), whom Emilio once deemed the brightest soon arrives. After a trauma she only confided to Emilio who supported her through it, Caitlin married a far older man who later skirted fringes of the January 6th assault; and buried herself in step-motherhood.
Emilio’s feelings for her are deeper than for his college ex, overloaded anaesthetist Kristina (Katie Leung) still recovering from her pandemic work, married with five kids, desperate to let rip. But, a military vet herself sporting her old uniform, she’s brought cousin and outsider Paco (Ferdinand Kingsley) possibly suffering with PTSD from his military tours. The only person he confided in was his ex, Caitlin.
The title’s more than two-edged: tensions between what people try to carve back from nostalgia, what’s really buried and who they are now are all set to collide. So after initial reunion euphoria, tensions mount, some take pot, nearly all alcohol; several unhinge themselves, recreating hormonal adolescence but in the gaunt reality of their older bodies, no longer equipped for it.
Emilio’s almost preppily judgmental with privilege, intellectual edge and an axe for Paco; wants to square accounts but score-settling overwhelms him. Welsh finely balances sympathy – and it rebalances at the end – with Emilio’s eruptive aggression. Kristina wants desperately to revisit pre-marital freedom if just in a rave, Leung quite magnificent as she describes an icy life of morgues, hardly balanced by Catholic reproduction.
Both Caitlin and Paco want to trace themselves back before the damage and start over: Caitlin till now frozen in cheerleader mode, in Kettle’s superb banked fire of surfaces and pratfalls, that takes fire at a white-heat moment. Paco’s chilled by later experiences where Caitlin’s emails to him seem the one time either of them felt real. It’s where Kingsley slowly reveals Paco’s eloquent, even erudite, far from any stereotype.
Kingsley also voices Simon the offstage character on a phone whom Emilio mainly talks to. Inscrutable Ursula’s happy as she is and amicably tolerates this gathering. The sexualities of three are revisited, recalibrated and revealed. Lawrance slowly surfaces as an authority, endlessly patient with a surprising ability to compromise. It’s only at the end with Emilio we learn more.
The dramatic coda doesn’t end with death, though there’s a prologue, perhaps overlong, however eloquent, where the takeaway’s offered. Whilst not quite sure this all ands squarely, it’s engrossing, profound and with a flicker of Chekhovian humour and misunderstanding, might prove the most lasting American drama about. emerging to a different world.
