Living Between Lies (#Festival45)
King’s Head Theatre, Islington
16/11/15
3 Stars
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Lies come in many different shapes and sizes. There are the lies you tell to others, or are told to you. The lies you tell yourself, knowingly or not, and the lies that emerge on a slow burn, where half-truths and evasions told to ease a convenient path through work or personal relationships final congeal into full-blown deceptions. And then finally there are the lies that people tell randomly, out of boredom and just for the hell of it, to make a grey day glow with passing colour.
All of these are on show in ‘Living Between Lies’, part of the ‘Festival 45’ running at the King’s Head Theatre.
There is no set to speak of, just the audience on three sides and a few chairs. There are four players, all women, and the show has been written and devised by the company, Underfoot Theatre, with the whole directed by Florence Bell, and running straight through for a tad over the hour.
The action interweaves the stories and mounting crises of four women whose lives are in different ways based on a series of lies. It is billed as a comedy drama but the tone is mostly sober and bleak, with the one exception being the relationship forged out of lies for fun. Much of the material is in monologue or dialogue form with the four women only meeting on a station platform at the very beginning and end of the play. While there is a logic to this I have to say I found this a missed opportunity, a chance lost to take the action and interaction to another level.
Lindsey (Orla Sanders) is a driven career-woman who is entirely focused on what remains an unspecified IT project to which she has become inordinately attached to the extent of calling it her ‘baby’. Her life revolves around early starts in the morning, visits to her paralysed mother in a care home, and increasingly frustrating encounters with her boss at work, who views her ‘baby’ rather differently from the way she does. It is all doomed to end in disaster with self-deception inviting ultimate deception by others.
Sanders captures well the intensity of her character and the destabilizing effect that her self-delusion has had on her ordinary behavior: passionate outbursts, and exaggerated denigration of others as well as an uneasy love-hate relationship with her mother. However, the writing of the character leaves something to be desired. There is little room for development and narrative. We know right from the start where this character is headed and few elements of the story are added once we have learned the initial scenario. This is a particular case of where interaction with other characters would be a good mechanism for momentum and development in the personal story.
Alice (Magdalena McNab) is likewise presented as a solo performance for the greater part, though in several crucial scenes she is on the phone or leaving voice messages where there is another person involved, whether her faithless and feckless future husband, Harry, (voiced by Christopher Sherwood) or his sister, Carole (Aleks Grela). She starts the play believing she has a totally perfect life in which she is going to settle down with Harry to have children. To this end she has given up a wonderful job opportunity in TV presenting.
It all quickly turns sour as Harry’s absences and late nights at home and extended travel abroad reveal that he is getting ready to leave Alice for someone else, and that neither marriage nor children will be an option. At this point the character flips into a hysterical defiance of the facts and a determination to cause one embarrassing scene after another – in a karaoke bar, at Harry’s work, and in front of a class of children where she cannot keep her cool.
There are plenty of histrionic opportunities for the actor in this role and McNab has some fine moments here, perhaps best of all in the extended Q & A with the children where the breakdown of her character is most affecting. However, for me the portrayal started off too hyper-intense and neurotic, even when all appeared well. This narrowed the scope of the potential psychological journey and flagged up the likely outcome very obviously. As before I thought that the writing laid out this character’s cards too soon and too clearly for the role to really deliver. Again, for such a needy character, an interlocutor, 
whether sympathetic or not, would have given the player more scope and energy to react around.
Kim (Aleks Grela) is a young woman living on the dangerous edge of things: poverty, drugs, a boyfriend, who may or may not be abusive, and an injured wrist are all on her mind. She reports to A&E in search of a prescription for pain. Is it for real pain or to feed an addition? There are elements of mystery in her character to be sure.
However, she is outbid in the mystery stakes by Laura (Joanne Fitzgerald), who appears to be a medically qualified professional but turns out not to be. Laura promises to give Kim a prescription if she reveals the secret of her mysteries. When she does so, she gets more than she bargains for and certainly no prescription. Laura adopts a number of guises: an aggressive lesbian, a jilted and disappointed wife, and more, until it appears that she enjoys lies for their own sake, or at the very least a highly creative relationship with the truth. The tables are turned and it is Kim who is made to seem square and orthodox despite her alternative lifestyle.
This juxtaposition of two characters has its oddities and loose ends, perhaps deliberately so. But it does have progression and nuanced interaction, which helps to give the characters more propulsion, and the performances more focus. Both women react well off each other, and demonstrate the mutually creative interaction, even fun, that can reside in lies. The play as a whole would benefit from more of this, even though it has valuable points to make as things stand about the omnipresence of lying in our lives. Reality and fantasy are after all a spectrum and it is more fun and more revealing to explore the steps along the way in company. There are some very good ideas here and some rich characterisations, but if the play is to travel to Edinburgh or other Fringe venues then this is the direction of development I would recommend.
Living Between Lies runs at the Kings Head Theatre until November 22.
