FringeReview UK 2024

Some Demon

Arcola Theatre, Papatango and Bristol Old Vic

Genre: Contemporary, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Theatre

Venue: Arcola Theatre Studio 1

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

“People say life’s too short. It’s not. It’s too bloody long.” There’s always a sense of a new world breaking in with Papatango prizewinners. That’s resoundingly true of Laura Waldren’s debut play Some Demon directed by  George Turvey at the Arcola Theatre Studio 1 till July 8^th.

Set in an eating disorder unit, it’s the most devastating winner since Samuel Bailey’s 2019 Shook, itself featuring a young offender’s unit. With an ambitious cast of six over two hours 45, there’s a touch of Long Day’s Journey into Night about the pace Turvey sets, and (despite bursts of fun) its possession. The thing that wants you dead.

But it grips throughout and any redemption offered is provisional. Waldren refuses to over-pathologize mental illness but details its effects with charcoal-rasped laughter humour and unflinching bleakness. Four patients flip their trajectories, change places as the demon inside them – two characters share a Nietzsche book – tries shouting its way out of their gut like a vocal Alien.

Some Demon’s true kin though are David Eldridge’s 2011 The Knot of the Heart, about middle-class drug addiction, and Duncan Macmillan’s 2015 People, Places and Things about alcoholism. Now revived, again with Denise Gough, it also underscores how different Some Demon is.

Not about all of them sharing middle-class female protagonists (Children TV presenter, actor, Hull uni students past and future). But Some Demon’s generous focus, particularly on two, then three protagonists makes this an ensemble experience. And because of the revolving door where some characters exit for a time, we’re given the chance to hear extended witness from two patients whose worlds disrupt or enhance the core plots.

Zoe (Sirine Saba) in her forties is finally moving towards recovery, after 25 years’ fighting her disorders. She knows the signs when any fellow inmate lies about following the unit’s strict regimen: like others she’s a fanatical cleaner, notices the thousandth scruple of a hair when someone skips a mouthful.

Drastically understaffed, with CDs glitching as a sonic metaphor for a slipping world, the unit’s propped up by over-proscriptive rules and word-filtered (“challenging thought”) group sessions whose hollowness is finely balanced by tentative suggestions that it can, occasionally, work.

The unit’s presided over by Leanne (Amy Beth Hayes) and her “I’m not Nurse Ratched” bad-cop approach. Leanne’s oblivious to someone’s crying till Zoe points it out: Hayes’ role can only blossom when opening up to Joshua James’ Mike, her empathic if tame colleague. But Mike’s character rises to equal that of Zoe’s, and new arrival Sam (Hannah Saxby).

Hayes too is lent agency to speak Leanne’s wearily-coping truth. Waldren’s hallmark is allowing that everyone’s right, to a point.

Sam’s just 18 and anxious to get out to start at Hull university. Though Zoe reveals that exit (unlike admission) isn’t voluntary. Initially withdrawn and bookish, Sam doesn’t warm to Zoe’s old-lag cynicism and revelations.

They soon bond though over 1980s new wave  as well as jumping CDs over cleaning fluids – sparking a single exuberant moment, splashing each other round the table. But Sam feels let down by Zoe, says something ending Act Two on an abyss.

Two other performances slowly emerge, given far more room in Act Three. Nazia (Witney White), is a Hull criminology graduate with an older partner and a veiled narrative she gradually emits like a witness to people she trusts. White’s also gifted some bravura hyper-active monologues early on, so her digging into later, crumpled Nazia stamps both performance and character reveal.

From the start initially disruptive Mara (Leah Brotherhead) impresses with ferocious strops over banned calorie-counting replacements for a tomato – a highpoint of this drama. Mara’s subsequent path is applauded by all save ever-suspicious Zoe. But there’s exits too, and not just ones patients aspire to. Brotherhead’s modulation is so swervy you feel there might be an obvious plot-reveal. Waldren though is more subtle, refusing tidy peripeteias.

Saba is outstanding as Zoe, who’s seen it all before but seems on a different path. Her bonding with Sam (scenes between her and Saxby infectious and devastating) and later, James, trace hope, witty sallies against the system, concealment, despair, denial and mute acceptance in a final line to Sam.

Saxby too impresses in her stage debut, moving out of silence and often back into it. Sam’s withdrawal from her blossoming after an incident ranges into an unlooked-for bitterness.

Mike though rises throughout in James’ performance. Mike’s reveals add cubits to witness, emerging from playing Leanne’s good-cop shadow to pierce both Zoe’s and Sam’s defensiveness. His final speech radiates dark authority.

Anisha Fields’ greyscale set of moveable tables and chairs (with a toilet entrance admitting plot-points) occasionally underuses a gallery set of a bleach-lit treatment room and bed above. Rajiv Pattani’s lighting though gradates storytelling moments to the main space. Asaf Zohar’s sound can explode, occasionally overwhelm, whirling from Haydn’s “Clock” Symphony (as aural ticking placebo) to Talking Heads’ Road to Nowhere.

Papatango plays tend to overlooked spaces: a Muslim funeral director’s, a separatist lesbian commune of one. So Shook, Iman Qureshi’s The Funeral Director, Georgia Bruce’s Time, Like the Sea, contrast only slightly with, say, Tom Powell’s The Silence and The Noise: teenagers splintering into a safe space. Or Clive Judd’s Here, a house haunted by family.

Waldren refuses the option of tracing the jagged redemption of one individual, as other playwrights might, and snapshots time spent in a unit over several months, with revolving doors too. We get backstories, but these reveal and don’t overburden. And Waldren refuses obviously hopeful tie-ups, or tragic melodrama: each character might choose a path.

More, Waldren, an actor, proves her generosity to each character in a six-strong debut play. He dialogue’s superb, memorably pithy, stamped in a unique environment. It might seem notionally long, but down where the changes are, this is a superbly uncomfortable edge-of-seat revelation. Groundbreaking, it’s also definitive on something we often see far too dimly.

Published June 22, 2024June 27, 2024 by Simon Jenner