Wild East ( Archived )

Reviews

From L to R: Sylvestra Le Touzel, Tom Brooke and Helen Schlesinger.

April de Angelis’s new 80-minute play tackles the big issue of corporate responsibility. It interweaves private and public worlds. It has strong metaphorical resonance.

At first it seems as if we are in for lethal anti-capitalist satire. Frank, a nerdy graduate anthropologist, is being interviewed for a key job in Russia by two formidable company-women. And our sympathies flood towards the hapless Frank as he is alternately soothed by the business-driven Dr Gray and gored by the sardonic Dr Pitt suffering from post-traumatic shock syndrome. But gradually it emerges that the two women, former lovers, are themselves enacting private battles under the mask of company loyalty.

Along the way De Angelis makes any number of excellent points: that anthropology is now viewed as a marketing tool, that messy personal emotions conflict with the corporate ethos and, above all, that the environment is at the mercy of the profit motive. But it is possible to agree with all De Angelis says while questioning her tactics. In particular the pivotal figure of Dr Pitt, played with shape-shifting acuity by Sylvestra Le Touzel, has to go through lightning reversals: savage inquisitor, rejected lover,company victim and even shamanic symbol.

De Angelis might argue that this is her point: that company life deprives people of coherent identity but the inevitable compression of a short play raises questions of plausibility: you wonder whether the two women would expose their love life in a recorded job interview. And the transformation of Frank from eccentric misfit into organisation man, ready to trample on a sacred artefact, is dictated by the argument rather than dramatic logic.

The play is highly watchable. Phyllida Lloyd’s production is sharp as a scalpel in exposing capitalist mores. Tom Brooke is also wonderfully funny as the nervy Frank and Helen Schlesinger neatly reveals the insecurities under Dr Gray’s expensively-accoutred exterior.

Michael Billington, THE GUARDIAN, 2 February 2005.

April De Angelis’s new play seizes on the scenario of the job interview and some wild fun with it. Two women, Dr Gray (Helen Schlesinger) and Dr Pitt (Sylvestra Le Touzel), are interviewing Frank, a nerdy, nervy anthropology graduate, for a position in an anonymous firm that helps foreign companies break into the Russian market.

When it emerges that the firm is being taken over, the recruitment process becomes a three-way fight for survival: it’s not just Frank (Tom Brooke) who is being assessed.

With its set-up of shifting allegiances and hidden agendas, Wild East is a crafty study of corporate dishonesty and exploitation. It’s robustly amusing too, and the cast in Phyllida Lloyd’s production perform with wit and gusto.

This isn’t an out-and-out comedy, though. At points savage, sometimes delicate, the play diagnoses a haemorrhage of soul in the West and a sense of things being out of control.

p(=reviewer-name). Maxie Szalwinska, METRO, 3 February 2005

I’ve had some strange interviews in my time. Once I was offered a job “because we need someone with a funny name”. But I have never witnessed or endured one in which an oppressed interviewee gets high on pot, shares it with a hostile interviewer, decides to practise Siberian shamanism on her, and gets punched in the gut as he forcibly tries to blow her lost soul back into her body. But that’s what happens at one of those points in April De Angelis’s new play where plausibility takes second place to creative dottiness.

The prospects for our exports must be truly dire when a company that is hoping to increase its sales of yoghurt to Russia – the situation in Wild East – has a top candidate for this task who is an obvious loser while his two interviewers are hopelessly unprofessional. Imagine Spanish inquisitors who have mislaid the keys to the rack or forgotten to bring matches to an auto-da-fe, and you have the level of their good nature and of their skill.

The opening of Phyllida Lloyd’s production, and much that follows it, is genuinely amusing. Into a typically charmless corporate room comes Tom Brooke’s spindly, gauche Frank in his Arthur Pewty suit and promptly mistakes Sylvestra Le Touzel’s Dr Pitt for a fellow candidate rather then, as he puts it, one of the “bastards” about to interview him.

That’s an error, because she’s already seething with frustration and anger. As we discover, she is recovering from being beaten up by a Russian pimp and then rejected by her lesbian lover for the boss she fears is about to sack her.

Since that former lover is Helen Schlesinger’s Dr Gray, and Dr Gray is not only her fellow interviewer but brings news of a corporate takeover and a likely downsizing, the prospects for Brooke’s Frank aren’t great.

He does himself few favours, revealing at one point that he misread the options at Lampeter and so graduated in anthropology rather then archaeology. But the tensions between the two women and their jockeying for position leave him wondering if he’s the victim of some good-cop, bad-cop routine, genuine aggro, sheer incompetence, or what.

Benedict Nightingale, THE TIMES, 3 February 2005

This is April De Angelis’s best play: a brilliantly funny, brilliantly evil and

brilliantly hopeful comedy for our schizophrenic times.

The writing is tough, taut, complex, allusive and vigorously theatrical.

Phyllida Lloyd directs with ferocious objectivity and the acting ripples with precision, violence and excitement.

The Sunday Times, John Peter, 6 February 2005

Wild East Review

Theatre Preview

Anthropology, according to April de Angelis, is a dangerous discipline. It can lead you, as it has led doctors Gray and Pitt, into the belly of a beastly corporation where your skill at observing human nature will be used to peddle, for instance, yoghurt to unsuspecting Russians. Frank, a blinking, bearded graduate, has come to be interviewed by these two post-Iron Curtain ladies of capitalism, in the hope that he too can sell out and join ranks.

The interview, which is ominousley videoed by the faceless Corporation, takes place in room 212, and George Orwell palpably lurks one floor below this darkly funny, beautifully crafted play. De Angelis’s writing is deceptively simple, and Phyllida Lloyd’s sharp, snappy direction takes no time getting underneath the skin of it all. Tom Brooke delivers a truly outstanding comic performance as the jittery, socially inept Frank, and Sylvestra Le Touzel’s brittle, hounded Dr Pitt invests the shifting power play between the characters with an unflagging dynamism and growing air of desperation…

Wild East Review

Variety

By Matt Wolf

Wild East is possibly best described as the funniest play Ionesco never wrote, but even that doesn’t do justice to the job interview gone eccentrically, even apocalyptically haywire that constitutes April De Angelis’s new play. Some will think the 80 minute piece no more than and extended stunt, and there’s no doubt one of its strengths is it knows when to stop. But auds in search of a fresh theatrical voice can start the celebrations now: For all that is unexceptional about Mark Thompson’s deliberately drab set, this is easily the loopiest evening in London.

Even the stage design, as it happens, turns out to be a gag in an expert production from helmer Phylida Lloyd that builds laugh upon laugh into a kind of dizzying comic grace that, as with much of the best comedy, is also somewhat sad.

Certainly, one look at the hapless Frank (Tom Brooke), and you don’t know whether to chuckle or weep. An overeager, nebbish possessed of the sort of dimness Mrs. Malaprop might have admired (he intended to study archaeology at college but got confused and ended up doing anthropology instead), Frank is the would-be stooge who ends up being far wilier than he appears.

At first, Frank seems a convenient doormat for the jockeying of position of the two woman, Dr. Pitt (Sylvestra Le Touzel) and Dr. Gray (Helen Schlesinger). They have come to ply him with questions, all the while doing what they can to shore up their own positions with a faceless corporation. That the woman apparently have their own shared history as lovers passes virtually unrecognised y Frank, who looks scarcely capable of comprehending events beyond the end of his nose.

But don’t be fooled. Who’s actually putting the squeeze on whom? The answer is increasingly up for grabs as the play continues, especially once our trio begins playing to the Big Brother-style camera that is recording the meeting for posterity (and for the corporate bigwigs) Dr. Gray can stop the film if necessary, but what she can’t forestall is De Angelis’ cunning elevation of a familiar scenario into a gentle essay in transcendence. Let’s put it this way: Not for nothing is there a set credit in the program for something called Miraculous Engineering.

The play, too remains one step ahead of its public. As played by a bespectacled Brooke with a gangly benignity reminiscent of a younger slimmer Jim Broadbent, Frank is no mere buffoon, however ludicrous his tales of life in his beloved beloved Russia, the country to which he hopes to return.

Nor do his interlocutors necessarily possess all the power. For all the starchy waspishness of her opening scenes (her initial putdown of Frank is pricelessly brusque), Dr. Pitt is on the rebound from both a failed relationship and a violent incident in Russia that has left her suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome and deeply unsure of her position within the firm.

Dressed for a glamorous fight to the death – the killer clothes are also by Thompson – Dr. Pitt ends up the shamanic agent of the play’s much – discussed word “Soul.” To reveal more would be to give away the surprises of a play whose sudden mood swings are part of its charm.

Le Touzel brings a snapdragon authority to the character’s more confident moments, as well as an incipient pathos to Dr. Pitt’s assertion that “it’s wild out there” – as it soon turns out to be in a meeting room far easier to enter than to leave…