Hell Is Other People — Especially Theatre Critics
★★½☆☆
Picture this: You walk into a show four minutes late, timing your entrance perfectly so that it aligns with the arrival of the play’s third actor. The conversation onstage gets heated quickly: why, oh why, are you here? Uninvited and unwanted. Did you want to write another bad review? Shit, you realise, you have stumbled in alongside the play’s antagonist: a theatre critic. Perhaps, you think, this may be the wrong play to review. Alas, you are seated, and like the characters in Other People will be trapped in the theatre for the next hour.
The play follows a group of old friends with one common interest: theatre. Rounding off their undergraduate degrees, they come together to celebrate a birthday. The stage is plainly but effectively decorated—a round table, four chairs, wine, flowers, a birthday cake—however, what is truly deserving of praise is Willa Meloth’s lighting, which, over the course of the next hour, transforms the static set into a number of liminal spaces, clearly distinguishing both physical and temporal movement.
The guests are as follows: Margot (Clara Curtis), birthday girl and theatre director; Olivia (Immy Griffiths), Margot’s best friend and star actor; James (Dylan Swain), the doting boyfriend; and Nick (Nathaniel Chapman), the unwelcome arrival. From the cast of characters alone—a director, an actor, a reviewer, and… a rugby player?—it is clear that the show will be best enjoyed by an audience that shares a proclivity for the drama that happens behind the scenes of every production.
Image via Kritvi Gupta
The four characters spit jibes at one another at dizzying speed. Audiences might find humour in this dialogue if it wasn’t so consistently barbed, each line deepening the sense of unease as the flaws of each character come to centre stage. Griffiths’ Olivia is equal parts admirable and detestable, while Curtis masterfully transforms Margot into a main character who is at once confident and shame-ridden. Nick’s decision to stay at the party seems to indicate a certain masochism, but it soon becomes evident that his penchant for lingering where he is clearly unwanted is a structural necessity for the clever metatheatrical scheme writers Lila Patterson and Leo Berenson have woven.
Being stuck at a shit party with people I dislike is my personal idea of hell. It was Jean-Paul Sartre’s too. The play takes its title from the famous line “hell is other people” from Sartre’s No Exit, which Margot has recently directed and Nick has poorly reviewed. Expanding on the sentiment of this quotation, No Exit tells the story of three characters damned to hell—here, not a burning fire, but a locked room in which they must remain in each other’s company forever.
Other People takes this idea to the next level. Not only are its characters clawing at each other’s throats, they are also inexhaustibly horny. The intimacy rites of university theatre students are often queasily compelling in real life, but unfortunately for Other People, much of the intrigue of these evenings relies on a curiosity about the sex lives of your peers—a curiosity which was hard to muster as an audience member having just been introduced to these characters.
The continual refrain of the play is of being newly 22, yet there is little space given to any of the emotional hurdles which mark the step into adulthood. Interpersonal conflict is glossed over in order to rehash who has slept with whom (spoilers! Everyone has slept with everyone, and if they haven’t yet, they sure want to). The play is an accurate portrayal of what occupies the shallows of a 22-year-old’s mind, but beyond its penchant for lurid realism seems unclear on what it is trying to say.
But then I suppose maybe that’s just being 22, and besides, what do I know? As the play astutely posits: those that can, do, and those that can’t, well, they review, right?
Muna Mir
