Review: Oh, My Green Soap Box, Pleasance Courtyard

Written for Culture Wars

“It’s going to be the biggest campaign ever”, enthuses Lucy Foster, a self-proclaimed revolutionary. It’s going to change the world so radically and fundamentally that nothing will remain the same. It will be like a world that has only ever looked at its feet staring at the sky for the first time.

Or, she might get sidetracked. She might meet a nice young man and fall into bed with him. She might meet a not so nice, not so young man and do the same. She might forget about time entirely and enjoy the empty satisfactions of lying next to another body, soaking in its warmth. She might just drink beer and eat chips.

Oh, My Green Soap Box is a scatty, but smart, theatrical essay about good intentions and guilty consciences. We can, she says, always do more; we can always act better. There will always be polar bears that need saving. (This is Foster’s chosen cause.) Perhaps, then, we can give ourselves a break occasionally. Maybe it’s alright for us, as humans, to fold in the face of an insurmountable heap of responsibilities. But maybe, Foster grapples, maybe it’s not.

While there is something rather touching about this roundabout inconclusiveness, Foster’s argument always sits a bit close to the fence it straddles. Spreading her material more thickly, condensing it, would add urgency to the central dilemma about the ethics of inaction.

However, this softly, softly approach pays off with the unexpected call to arms of her final image. Having created an arctic habitat from a white sheet draped meticulously over three chairs, she drags it offstage with an aching slowness to leave behind a barren, inhospitable landscape. It is an image that cuts through an overfamiliar understanding of environmental politics and lands the consequences directly, powerfully, in your lap.

As a performer, Foster is a likeable presence. Just. She is always a touch too controlled and measured in her delivery and you find yourself wishing that she’d let go, abandon the fixities of the text – quirky and thoughtful though it is – and really talk to us as people.

She manages it occasionally, most notably in her delightfully ridiculous propaganda video, in which she takes to London’s streets and parks dressed as a cuddly polar bear. As she converses with the bemused populace, admitting the flaws in her own attempts, she manages to make her point about everyday ethics and heartily entertain at the same time. Behind the fluffed mask, Foster seems most comfortable, willing to drop her guard, and if she could find that the live performance Oh, My Green Soap Box would snowball.

As it is, it’s an agreeable but modest start to an ambitious crusade.