Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness ( Archived )

Reviews

From L to R: Shaun Dingwall, Tom Georgeson, Marion Bailey, Tanya Moodie.

Photography: Stephen Cummiskey

A TALENT TO TREASURE

David Eldridge appears to take his dramatic cue from Tolstoy, who wrote at the start of Anna Karenina: All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Certainly different kinds of familial misery have powered his recent work. In his superb stage adaptation of the film Festen, now bound for Broadway after great success at the Almeida and in the West End, he showed a family celebration disrupted when a son accuses his father of persistent child abuse.

In M.A.D., seen last year at the Bush, he gave an unforgettably affecting account of an 11-year-old boy desperately trying to save his parents’ troubled marriage. And now comes this equally powerful play in which the hero struggles to come to terms with his mother’s death from cancer and his father’s ensuing relationship with the nurse who cared for her.

There are echoes of Hamlet in the situation, with the sexes reversed, and Eldridge’s upwardly mobile, working-class hero Joey also finds himself haunted by a ghost, afflicted with dreadful mental confusion, and unable to sustain a relationship with the woman he loves.

Every word counts, and the spare, elliptical dialogue often reaches profound emotional depths. Better yet, it never succumbs to facile pessimism. The play’s act of kindness may be both random and incomplete, but they are acts of kindness nevertheless. Again and again, characters reveal a sudden, unexpected generosity of spirit, and the play is delightfully populated with a succession of kindly if sometimes ineffectual priests.

This is a play that grapples with big questions, most notably the cruelly random nature of life, and the way this seems to deny the possibility of a loving God, but one emerges from the theatre feeling purged and even uplifted.

Seam Holmes directs a compelling production on an almost bare stage, setting up scenes with great economy, and ensuring that the plays complex construction never leaves the audience bewildered.

Shaun Dingwall is superb as the troubled Joey, catching the way depression combines savage moods with a ghastly sense that all colour and joy have been drained from life. Tom Georgeson slowly lays bare the humanity and hurt that lie beneath the surface of his apparently brutal father, and there is superb support from Heshima Thompson as the troubled schoolboy, Tanya Moodie as his grieving mother, and Howard Ward as a succession of richly comic clergymen.

Eldridge combines a hugely sympathetic sensibility with rare dramatic power, and one leaves this exceptional play rejoicing in his talent and impatient for his next.

Charles Spencer, DAILY TELEGRAPH, 18 May 2005.

When your most recent script has provided the verbal fuel for one of the West Ends greatest hits, what do you do next? For David Eldridge, who adapted Festen for the stage last year to widespread acclaim, the answer is curious.

His new work, Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness, is a real slippery eel of a play – a structurally and psychologically elusive piece that requires much splashing around in order to grasp its meaning. It focuses on the disintegrating world of a man, Joey, who is struggling to cope with the varying consequences of the Iraq War, the murder of a boy he has been teaching to read, and his father’s love for another woman following his mother’s death.

In Sean Holmes’s beautifully acted, assured production, Shaun Dingwall is magnetic as the humorously confident yet mentally vulnerable Joey. Thematically the play echoes Hamlet, but structurallyas with Arthur Miller’s After the Fall, the stage seems to represent the interior of the central character’s mind, so that when other people appear it is as if they have been conjured out of the shadows of his memory.

This is an extremely daring device given that Joey is losing control of his mind and the inevitable result is that we as the audience share in his disorientation as seemingly random events surge out of the darkness. The only way to make such a piece of work is to give each individual event a vivid emotional charge and this proves to be the strength of Holmes’s production, whether its depicting a black boy delivering a haunting rendition of a Marvin Gaye song, or showing the grief of a young bereaved mother. Despite such resonant moments, this is a frustrating if ingenious evening. It’s skilful chaos ultimately undermines its searing emotional depth.

Rachel Halliburton, TIME OUT, 18-25, 2005.

David Eldridge’s new play could just as easily be titled Incomplete and Random Acts of Violence. Joey is in the middle of a crisis. His mother has just died; Trevor, a pupil he was giving extra reading lessons to, has been killed at school for his camera and the Iraq war is all over the newspapers. His fiance has left him, he is fighting constantly with his father, who has begun another relationship and his is obsessed with the music and death of Marvin Gaye.

Eldridge evokes all this as a series of non-linear fragments. People walk in and out of Joey’s world like actors in a play in which there is no structure. Time is in a constant state of ellipsis. By this design, Eldridge powerfully suggests that it is precisely Joey’s inability to find meaning or a coherent narrative for the chaos he sees around him that is responsible for his profound sense of dislocation and alienation.

Crucially, the play itself is rarely incoherent, thanks to Sean Holmes’s highly disciplined production, played out on a bare stage, Shaun Dingwall’s excellent performance as Joey and Eldridge’s own exacting command of his material.

Holmes could have injected a bit more zing: the abstract nature of the dialogue needs pace to keep it ticking over. But Eldridge beautifully marries form and content to produce a play that resonates far beyond the very personal world it portrays.

p(=reviewer-name). Claire Allfree, METRO, 17 May, 2005

The Royal Court’s current taste for fractured narratives, elliptical dialogue and alienated characters continues with Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness, the latest play by David Eldridge. Staccato scenes of often half-finished sentences play out as if were in the mind of the troubled hero.

Like his New York-bound adaptation of Festen, Eldridge’s play has a young man at odds with his family and the world. Joey is in meltdown. He has lost his mother to cancer and can’t accept his cabbie father’s new girlfriend. His fiance, Kate, has left him. His love affair with America has been soured by the Iraq war. And when, as a volunteer literacy tutor, he finds himself taking a paternal interest in the teenager Trevor, his pupil is fatally attacked at school, which fills Joey with guilt.

It takes time for us to get a sense of all this as Eldridge flits back and forth in time and forces us to share Joey’s sense of dislocation throughout the play’s 90 minutes. Such fuzziness can make one as exasperated with Joey as those around him. Its not all about you says his best friend, Colin, trying to juggle Joey’s concerns and his own family life, and it’s easy to agree. At least Joey’s troubled perspective is vividly conjured up by Sean Holmes’s strong production with a bare stage surrounded by chairs and the actors seated ready to move in and out of scenes.

As Joey, an excellent Shaun Dingwall gives the sense of a decent man cast adrift in a sea of disaffection.

There is powerful support, too, from Tom Georgeson as his brooding father, Kellie Bright as his affectionate fiance, Heshima Thompson as Trevor, whose love of Marvin Gaye becomes an obsession for Joey (including the fact that Gaye’s father killed him), and Tanya Moodie as Trevors mother.

Ian Johns, TIMES, 17 May 2005.

Ten years ago, the Royal Court was the focus for what became known as in-yer-face theatre. Now it seems to be encouraging what I can only call behind-your-back drama: elliptical, oblique, non-linear plays that leave the audience to piece together narrative and meaning

What one is left with, in Sean Holmes’s beautifully stark Theatre Upstairs production, is a strong sense of personal nightmare. Shaun Dingwall’s Joey excellently suggests a good man facing the fragmentation of his world and there is first-rate support from Tom Georgeson as his surly father, Heshima Thompson as his persecuted pupil and Tanya Moodie as the murdered boy’s stoical mother.

Michael Billington, GUARDIAN, 16 May 2005.

David Eldridge’s play needs total concentration. It is fragmented and jagged, with short episodes that move back and forth in time. I think it is a play of memory and conscience. Joey (Shaun Dingwall) is a teacher, a man on the run both from and towards home and a purpose in life. It is also about rejection and failure, because Joey has a way of making the wrong move with people. He is an unfinished man. If Eldridge were to tell his story in chronological order, it would be less interesting, but his technique is more than simply jazzing up a narrative. Watching the play is like moving inside someone mind as it scans the past, looking for explanations, trying to find causes that might make sense of the effects that are his life. If I am right, the play is a piece of moral detective work: something most people carry out on their past at one time or another; an internal drama with, necessarily, an open ending. Sean Holmes directs with the speed and precision of a surgeon, giving each of the eight characters room to breathe a difficult thing in a play that moves with short, sharp steps. Tom Georgeson and Tanya Moodie stand out in a strong cast.

John Peter, THE SUNDAY TIMES, 22 May 2005