STAGE
Ordinary Dreams, Trafalgar Studios 2
3/5
IN A NUTSHELL
The burden of London life gets too much for Dan in Marcus Markou's patchy but perky take on parental paranoia and middle class meltdown.
REVIEW
Life is tough. Just ask Miles. The Tube, the grind, the hoodies, the Cityboys. Miles will tell you. You break down the daily challenges into their constituent parts and - phewee - that's a lot for a man to take. Miles knows this.
He knows this better than anyone - least he thinks so - and... and not only that, Penny's contractions are - what are they now? - Penny's contractions are a minute apart and the louts are leaving broking glass on the pavements - broken glass! - and next-door's Barry White is bulging the walls... and Miles... well, Miles doesn't like his job, his location, location, location, his life or his lot and, most of all, he doesn't like the prospect of letting down his child.
Miles doesn't want to fail. But Miles is failing.
So life gets the better of Miles (James Lance). And put-upon partner Penny (Imogen Slaughter) now has two new burbling babies in the house and only one of them has any kind of future.
Miles repairs to a wheelchair, semi-catatonic, clad in a stab vest, grumbling and fuming like Alf Garnett leaving Penny to cope. She's a legend when it comes to coping, Penny. Coping with the baby, coping with her own demons, coping with her crumbling marriage and the amorous attentions of an AA cohort.
Miles hasn't got any real angst of course. He's more Mr Benn than Travis Bickle. Not like destructive uni pal Dan (Adrian Bower) who's also a recovering alcoholic with weird dreams of teeth and beetles and celery stalkers. But Dan has hippy chick Layla (Sia Berkeley) to feed him herbal teas so he's happy, right?
"I wish I were an alcoholic," moans Miles. "At least you know who your enemy is."
In director Adam Barnard's perky but patchy Ordinary Dreams, Marcus Markou's script gives the drifting Miles a means to work his way back to Penny and the baby - a fantasy which places the hobbling, jobless no-mark in the role of a Blair-esque aspirant, a people's champion promising a better future than the PM he bests on air.
Rancour
Here's where James Lance's performance comes alive. He's a smoothie by nature - his DNA is as flawless as a Wet'n'Wild spiral ride - so he's more comfortable in his skin as slick Miles than Meldrew Miles.
The production is much the same way. The script scrabbles to please - its focus fixed on the swiftest tack to the next one-liner - so it never entirely reconciles itself to the nerve-shredding rancour at its heart.
Dan Bower and Imogen Slaughter have more grit in their roles, so more traction. Slaughter finds in Penny a flicker of weary warmth, like a dying match in a freezer bag, while Bower finds a redolent lo-fi dryness that makes dissolute Dan the most endearing of the quartet. Siren Sia Berkeley is a dream, picking up the pieces of shattered lives, endlessly artless and optimistic.
Laughs; there are bundles - and hearty ones too. But the pat Ballardian satire can only misfire in a week when we've sunk to a new realm of moral collapse. If the writer had descended this deep to skewer the truth, his nose would have bled and his eardrums burst.
Fortunately, Ordinary Dreams never truly aims to unnerve. It intends to charm and entertain. So we take to the streets, not with grand revolution in our heads but with small change in our pockets.
- First published on wharf.co.uk
