REVIEW: Plastic Figurines, New Diorama Theatre ✭✭✭✭

Plastic Figurines

New Diorama Theatre

16 April 2015

4 Stars

Review by James Garden

The audience enters to a familiar scene—an NHS waiting room. But this time, all is a tiny bit fractured. The perspective all wrong, and the straight wall lines fade off into the distance. In the corner, we find a crying girl. Thus designer Katie Scott quite successfully invites us into the upside down world of the mind of one of our leads—Michael. With a clear but directly unstated learning disability, and a mother in hospital with Leukaemia, Michael’s sister Rose returns home from Edinburgh to care for him.

Plastic Figurines, presently on tour across the UK, and currently stopped at the New Diorama Theatre is a tour de force two-hander one-act, illuminating the limits of love—when caring for someone and loving them are positioned firmly at odds from one another. These short beautiful vignettes piece together a fragmented story of brother and sister who truly care for each other, but at their core, cannot maintain their present state.

Rose is played by the endearing Remmie Milner, whose understated sadness sits at the centre of the reality of the piece. This could cause the work to feel heavy handed, but with her light touch, the piece plays at a perfect pace. Her calibre is matched perfectly by Jamie Samuel, as the brother Michael. It is difficult to play a disabled character—the thin line between careful studied representation and caricature can so easily be stumbled across, but Samuel never comes close. His moments of destabilisation are simply heartbreaking. Milner and Samuel listen to each other at all times-- their relationship on stage unshakeable and utterly watchable.

Playwright Ella Carmen Greenhill has crafted an extremely authentic world for these two to inhabit, and even the plays central metaphor of the plastic teenage mutant ninja turtles, which in a less adept hand could feel heavy handed, is well placed.

The only place in which the piece falls short in some ways is the music. Chris Hope has created a beautiful and lush ambient score, reminiscent of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, which, when used appropriately fits perfectly into the action and develops the aural world of the play quite well. There are a few moments—but only one or two-- where perhaps this young theatre company doesn’t necessarily trust the high quality of its own work, and the music pulls an audience away from the action, which the actors so excel at inviting them into. But overall, the music is perfect and the sound design by Chris James is equally matched and unobtrusive just as sound design should be. As there are many scenes that don’t actually take place in an NHS waiting room, Richard Owen’s lighting design does a significant amount of the heavy lifting to give us the “who/what/when/where” of the scenario, and it does so exceptionally well.

Plastic Figurines is unmissable. If you struggle to see it before it leaves the New Diorama, find it out of town. It is just that good.

For more information on Plastic Figurines visit the Box Of Tricks Theatre website