REVIEW: Wood, Vault Festival ✭✭✭

Mark Ludmon reviews Adam Foster’s new play Wood at London’s Vault Festival

Wood

Vault Festival, London

Three stars

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Billed as a story about a 1980s porn star struggling with impotence, Adam Foster’s new play Wood turns out to be much more. After tackling questions around sexual consent in his previous play Clay, he sets out to explore the power relationships that sit at the heart of all storytelling. The show’s marketing does hint that the play itself will begin to “unravel” but that still doesn’t prepare you for the clever twists that end up screwing with your mind.

The unravelling starts to occur early on (but, if you really want to keep it a surprise, stop reading now). It opens as a comedy about a successful American porn star, John Rolando, who, in 1983 Los Angeles, finds himself unable to get it up for filming despite vigorous efforts, hilariously represented using a traditional bicycle pump. The jokes are sharp, the performances are funny, but then it suddenly stops. It turns out this is in fact a play rehearsal by a group of British actors, with the lead role of John performed by its writer, George. He is a modern man: he’s totally woke, he’s a passionate feminist, he even insisted on gender-blind casting for the part of porn director Larry. But there’s only so far he was expecting to go in telling his story. With news of David Mamet’s play, Bitter Wheat, inspired by the Harvey Weinstein scandal coming to the West End in June, Wood is a timely look at women’s stories, who is telling them and how female roles are depicted. And it isn’t afraid to recognise that these questions also apply to the white male writer of Wood itself.

As a frequent theatre-goer, I love productions that deconstruct and challenge forms so, for me, the self-referential theatricality behind Wood is a delight. Adroitly directed by Grace Duggan, it features four excellent performances from Claire Cartwright, George Fletcher, Philippa Hogg and Nneka Okoye, with plenty of laugh-out-loud humour. It playfully presents interesting ideas around power and patriarchy but, for all its ambition, it risks being a theatrical exercise that has nowhere to go despite a teasing blurring of the lines between fiction and reality towards the end. At 50 minutes, it zips along with wit and ingenuity, so it is to its credit that it ends leaving you wanting more.

Running to 3 March 2019