REVIEW: Alpha Beta, Finborough Theatre ✭✭

Christian Roe and Tracey Ifeachor in Alpha Beta. Photo: Giulia Savorelli Alpha Beta

Finborough Theatre

24 June 2015

2 Stars

For socially awkward Brits it’s hell on Earth. Being trapped at a dinner party or in a car with an arguing couple. You stare forward with a glazed look in your eye hoping that it’ll all blow over and everyone will make amends over a cup of tea. Imagine that feeling of unease and awkwardness extended for an hour and forty minutes and you’ll have some idea of what it’s like to sit through Alpha Beta at the Finborough Theatre.

The play, by Ted Whitehead, features an unhappily married couple, Mr and Mrs Elliot, who have imprisoned themselves within a domestic incarceration of marriage, family and society’s twitching curtains. Battling through their mutual loathing for the sake of the kids, they soon begin to destroy each other through an ugly routine of rows, affairs and suicidal blackmail.

It’s exactly as bleak as it sounds; the entire play is one long, petty, extended, circular argument, stretched over nine miserable years. There’s very little respite (apart from a blissful five minutes in Act Three) – the two deliberately wind each other up and go after each other for the whole production. Not that there is anything automatically wrong with that, some of our greatest theatre thrives on anger and tension - it’s more the sheer repetitiveness and pointless of it all.

There is very little discernible plot and you can almost hear the audience muttering ‘Here they go again’ as another seemingly everlasting row is sparked by an innocuous comment. The script is so circular that it feels almost like a prequel to Groundhog Day. Why are we staying together? Why did we fall in love? Why are you seeing that ‘slut’? (A word used so often in this production it seems to lose all meaning).

Another issue is that the principal characters are so dislikeable that it is nearly impossible for the audience to care about the state of their relationship. For example, surely only the most cartoonish super villain would react to the news that their wife was planning to kill herself and their kids with the jibe “I can’t have you dispatching all my problems at once”? The characters wallow so much in their hatred of each other that you’re almost left thinking that they are saddled with the unhappiness they ultimately deserve.

There’s a further snag over the way in which the play is framed. Alpha Beta opened in 1972 and is very much rooted in the 60s. Prices are given in shillings and many of the key themes – virginity, the ‘shame’ of divorce and questions of sexual freedom – come across as somewhat dated. This would be all well and good if this was a period production but the staging seems to imply that it is set in the present day. Audience members enter to the dulcet tones of modern talk radio (Iain Dale if I’m not mistaken) and Verity Quinn’s set and the assorted props have a touch of modern minimalism about it. If there was an effort to resituate the play in the 21st century, then it really didn’t land.

The cast of Tracy Ifeachor and Christian Roe do a creditable job. They put in a sterling effort with a fairly rotten script; I got the impression the pair knew they were trying to roll a proverbial pebble up a mountain and they deserve credit for giving it everything. Ifeachor especially manages to inject some real heart and vulnerability into what could have easily become a two dimensional bitter and jilted female lead. Roe’s sarcastic, pretentious and sexually repressed Mr Elliot is compelling in parts, but has a tendency to veer towards the shouty. The overall volume of this production is so intense that when the play reached its true dramatic high point towards the end, the cast was left with nowhere to go.

The staging was certainly the strongest aspect of this production. Rather than a conventional stage, the whole theatre was modeled as an actual living room, with the audience welcome to sit wherever they chose (I opted for the living room table – a perfect place to rest a reviewer’s notebook!). As a result, the drama took place around the audience, meaning that we literally felt like gawkers at some sort of domestic meltdown. It was cleverly done and you really felt that with the right sort of play the setting could have worked wonders, like the wonderful Sweeney Todd at Harrington’s Pie and Mash Shop. It was perhaps a bit too close for comfort for one poor audience member though, who got splattered with paint during one of the many scenes of destruction within the performance!

There was also some careful attention to detail with the props; realistic looking ‘family photos’ were hung up on the wall and the characters somehow managed to acquire steaming cups of hot coffee from the off-stage kitchen – no fake sipping for them!

By the end of production, nearly all of the furniture has been smashed, they’d called each other every insult imaginable and one of the characters has threatened to kill themselves four times. And yet nothing has changed in terms of plot and character development. I’m sure Ted Whitehead would say that this perfectly represents the true nature of unhappy marriages. This may be true but it doesn’t make for good theatre, despite the best efforts of a talented cast.