The Sugar Syndrome ( Archived )

Reviews

Reviews

Pictured (L to R): Stephanie Leonidas, Will Ash and Andrew Woodall.

Photography by Ivan Kyncl.

How would you expect most writers to deal with a middle-aged paedophile who has served time for molesting little boys and is now setting up a playground meeting with an 11-year-old called Danny? Not the way a new young dramatist called Lucy Prebble does in her engrossing Sugar Syndrome, that for sure.

For one thing, Danny is actually Danielle or Dani, a 17-year-old who likes to play life-games that range from the impish to the dangerous.

For another, Prebble makes a serious effort to see Paedophile Tim from Paedophile Tim point of view, as an intelligent, well-educated man who lives furtively in a dump estate and genuinely tries to suppress drives he desperately wished he didn’t have.

The play isn’t as tightly written and structured as it might be, but it radiates talent and humanity. All its four characters are troubled. Dani has done time in a mental hospital, still suffers from bulimia, and regularly plays truant from her sixth-form college. Her mother seems unable to do anything more purposeful than cut up her neglectful, adulterous husband trousers, starting with the groin parts. And Dani’s other chat-room chum is an awkward nerd who, when she engineers and erotic encounter, botches the event and its aftermath.

The overall subject is, I suppose, emotional isolation and sexual confusion in the internet era; but, despite the efforts of Kate Duchene and Will Ash to interest us in the mum and the nerd, there no hiding the fact that theye cursorily characterised. The play’s prime focus is on Dani, in Stephanie Leonidas’s excellent performance a tease, trickster and would-be succubus who nevertheless has an instinctive generosity, and on Tim, the “big, balding perve” she befriends.

Andrew Woodall catches this character wariness and weariness very well, but is almost too emphatic when it comes to bringing out his distress. He frowns. He wrings his hands. He angrily thumps his thighs as he recalls the obsession that aversion therapy could not dampen. Everything about him proclaims: I am a poor tormented paedophile. And, yes, that’s a refreshing corrective to the shallow, prejudiced view of sex offenders propagated by Dani’s offstage father, who is (improbably) a tabloid editor.

But perhaps humanising the sinner means that the sin isn’t damned clearly enough. A glance at the text shows that what Dani finally discovers on Tim computer is horrible. Why, then, does Marianne Elliott’s production underplay that moment? The sound of childhood terror wouldn subvert Prebble’s play: only increase its truth, texture and complexity.

Benedict Nightingale, THE TIMES, 21 October 2003

This first play by 22-year-old Lucy Prebble has many of the virtues-and some of the faults-you expect in early work. It tackles tricky subjects, such as paedophilia and teenage psychological disorders, with unselfconscious candour: at the same time, having outlawed instant moral judgment, Prebble can quite determine what io put in its place.

Like Patrick Marber in Closer, Prebble shows how online chatrooms can easily lead to crossed wires. The screwed-up, sexually knowing 17-year-old Dani (short for Danielle) meets the lonely 38-year-old Tim, who is under the impression he has been in intimate internet conversation with a young boy.

Dani, however, discovers in Tim a wounded soulmate to whom she can relate far more easily than her scatty middle-class mum or the geeky guy with whom she has occasional sex: she even optimistically believes she can help the tormented Tim in his guilt-ridden struggles with paedophilia.

Prebble writes honestly and well, in a manner reminiscent of Shelagh Delaney in A Taste of Honey, about the attraction of outsiderish opposites: the plausibility of the central relationship is confirmed by Dani teenage mockery of Tim “dad-rock” and his despair at her rejection of classical literature. But, although Dani reassures Tim that she belongs to a generation that “doesn judge anything anyone does, only how it reported”, she is sickened when she sees the sadistically pornographic images on his laptop. You are left unsure whether Prebble is telling us that Dani is not as cool as she seems, that Tim is not as reformed as he would wish, or that, in the end, all actions have to be viewed in a defined moral context.

Prebble’s purpose may be unclear but she has an instinctive playwright gift for grabbing your attention and compelling sympathy for damaged people. And all four actors in Marianne Elliott deft Theatre Upstairs production have a fine neurotic intensity. Stephanie Leonidas’s emotional fragility as the bulimic Dani finds its echo in the defensive irony of Andrew Woodall as the traumatised Tim. And both Kate Duchene as Dani’s abandoned mum and Will Ash as her anorak boyfriend exude a strange solitariness as if that, in Prebble’s eyes was the natural human condition. A promising first play.

Michael Billington, THE GUARDIAN, 21 October 2003

There could hardly be a play more up to the moment than The Sugar Syndrome. This dark, distinctly amusing comedy by young Lucy Prebble delves into the twilight world of internet chatrooms, where paedophiles pass themselves off as teenagers to try to arrange meetings.

Miss Prebble’s intentions are serious, but her droll, dry humour keeps breaking through and taking over. For the chatrooms in the Sugar Syndrome are soon forgotten. They only serves as the escapist resort of the recovering anorexic heroine, Dani whose opposing aspects of vulnerability and sophisticated mockery are captured in Stephanie Leonidas’sadorable, waif-like performance. And Marianne Elliot’s production, although hampered by Jonathan Elsom’s ponderous, ugly design which primarily consists of a redundant, mobile wall catches the right, light mood.

Prebble’s characteristic tone of sexual and mischievous jocularity is revealed in the first moments of gay abandon, when a meeting in cyberspace almost at once becomes an actual encounter in the flesh. The dialogue sparks and sparkles. Hardly has the disturbed and bored 17-year-old Dani met geeky, 22-year-old Lewis (Will Ash) on the net than she daringly turns up in his bedroom and almost at once brings him to the brink of premature ejaculation, at which point there is no stopping him or controlling her boredom.

More to Dani’s playful taste, is her second transfer from cyberspace to raw reality. Masquerading as an 11-year-old boy, she attracts the attention of Tim, a 30-something gay paedophile and sacked classics teacher, lately released from prison. It is disappointment at first sight for him. Their subsequent, not very plausible friendship, which too easily ignores the fact that Dani is the wrong gender and age, depends upon the girl eagerness to help a fellow outsider.

For Dani, with an absent, adulterous father and a hilariously self-pitying mother (Kate Duchene), who is treated by her daughter like a silly, unworldly juvenile, lacks either happiness or security. Andrew Woodall powerfully conveys Tim anger and anguish as well as his humour, though Dani’s late discovery of the shocking nature of Tim perversion thanks to his telltale computer strikes a false melodramatic note and underscores the fact that the plot-lines of the Sugar Syndrome waver and trail. But this promising author’s comic touch is unerring.

Nicholas de Jongh, EVENING STANDARD, 21 October 2003

This year has been a good one for new plays, but The Sugar Syndrome is the first that strikes me as a must-see.

The first full-length professional play by Lucy Prebble, it has moral seriousness, suspense, compassion and topical interest (sex, the internet, a paedophile, an eating disorder). And it’s often wonderfully funny.

It is astonishing how rich a texture this play develops with only four characters: it keeps opening up, taking new turns. Marianne Elliott directs; the acting throughout is excellent. Stephanie Leonidas has all the disturbing, honest, precocious ebullience needed for the difficult character of Dani. Kate Duchene, playing her mother Jan as unconsciously absurd and yet as rounded a character as any here, has never been better. Will Ash takes the 22-year-old Lewis from being the play’s simplest character to the brink of psychopathic behaviour with complete, even endearing naturalness. But I must single out Andrew Woodall’s account of Tim. I was breathtaken here by tiny little reflexes, slight turns of the head or eyes, with which he hinted at the pain and embarrassment within Tim; by the awkward stiffness with which he starts at one point to dance with Dani; by the gentle command of speech with which, in his firm bass voice, he delivers this character’s most biting passages of irony. It is a sign of Lucy Prebble’s instant maturity that she has written a play that occasions acting of this order.

Alistair Macaulay, FINANCIAL TIMES ****, 23 October 2003