REVIEW: Game Theory, Tristan Bates Theatre ✭✭✭

Game Theory At the Tristanm Bates Theatre London
Teresa, Emma and Charlie. Photo: Camilla Whitehill

Game Theory
1 April 2015
Tristan Bates Theatre
3 Stars
Review by James Garden

There’s a scene from the 1998 relatively obscure rom-com starring Angelina Jolie, “Playing by Heart,” in which her character says, “Talking about love is like dancing about architecture.” Whilst it is highly unlikely that Game Theory’s writer Odessa Celt has seen such an obscure movie, which attracted much of its audience due to the height of X-Files mania and its casting of Gillian Anderson, they are curiously wise words that all writers must heed when travelling down the path of theatre-as-vehicle-for-debate.

Game Theory, a theatrical diptych currently on at the Tristan Bates Theatre, poses some serious questions about the ethics of hymenoplasty and newborn genomic sequencing. Unfortunately, the humanity of the characters sometimes gets lost in a sea of rhetoric

The first play, Membrane, is the story of two former lovers—the man, a prominent private plastic surgeon, and the woman, a devout muslim who wants to appear as if she is a virgin on her wedding night. Thus, the stage is set for a classic east vs. west debate.

But that seems to be all that we’re given.

While well-acted by Andrew Pugsley, and Nadia Shash, with Georgina Blackledge performing as wife giving a lecture in an interstitial scene, the piece feels a little like the debate takes precedence over the action. Theatre is meant to be heightened language, but some of the debate feels forced, with the characters’ romantic pasts shoehorned in order to create drama where there otherwise would be very little. This is where “talking about love…” comes in, and the moment where the characters reveal their romantic past just feels forced.

Structurally, however, the piece pulls off a nice trick with the lecture scene given by the doctor’s wife. It’s a lovely moment where the text gets out of its own way and lets an audience derive some of the meaning on its own.

Mutiny, the second play, has the reverse problem.

The issue at hand, genomic sequencing of newborns, is not only widely available, but privately, and cheaply. A cursory google search or listening to the podcast Serial will reveal an ad for “23 and me,” a service that explicitly tests for inherited conditions, drug responses, and genetic risk factors. The price is relatively low– £125, including shipping. The test is done at home with a saliva swab. Granted, this is not a service explicitly for new-borns, but it is not a stretch to think two parents might buy a kit for when they arrive home from hospital– or perhaps one parent would, to the shock of the other.

Thus Mutiny falls slightly flat; the worry over private vs. NHS seems moot, considering the “cheap” NHS price mentioned by the father is only £25 less than the real life private one—and “23 and me” is 1/7th the price of the fictional private offering. Curiously, the characters’ reactions to this world in which they find themselves feels significantly more genuine and considered. The parents react to the events surrounding them, and thus reveal themselves, instead of telling us who they are and what they feel all the time.

Perhaps this is why Andrew Puglsey and Georgina Blackledge’s performances in this half of the diptych are not only very good but so much stronger than in Membrane. They are allowed to embody their work without speaking it quite so much. Similarly, there are moments where one simply doesn’t believe Nadia Shash’s didacticism in Membrane as the woman desperate to present herself as a virgin. But, in Mutiny, she brings colour and life to a relatively small character in the Nurse that is nuanced and extremely watchable.

The production itself is extremely well considered—designer Fi Russell and lighting designer Matthew Swithinbank have done an excellent and thoughtful job. And sound designer Matthew Wilkinson’s work is delightfully unobtrusive but fills the world of the play out extremely well.

Overall, Game Theory leaves one with far more questions than answers. Unfortunately, they tend to be about the form and structure of the show, far more than the substance which it tries to debate.

Game Theory runs until April 18, 2015 at the Tristan Bates Theatre

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