Written for Culture WarsIf you have even a single, solitary brain cell, its best to avoid Stand By Your Van at all costs. Inspired by American ‘Touch the Truck’ endurance contests, in which the last contestant maintaining contact with the vehicle drives it home, Stand By Your Van condenses 80 gruelling hours of competition into 80 gruelling minutes. One Texan competitor, we are told, shot himself around the 24 hour mark. Given the conversation rate employed by Anna Reynolds’ play, that seems about right.
Relying on the standard formula of situation comedy, Reynolds place a range of characters into a single set of circumstances and – ta-da – conflict materialises. However, beyond the equation itself, she manages to get nothing right.
Her characters are so one-dimensional it’s a wonder that they’re even perceptible. There’s The Religious One; The Middle-class One; The Pretty One; The Infuriatingly Laddish One; The Infuriatingly Girly One; The Old Lady One, et cetera, et cetera. Ta-da.
Even more destructive is the fact that Reynolds forgets to bother to develop the conflict. Instead, time fast-forwards to the ‘exciting’ bits, characters pad their way around the van, changing formation and then – ta-da – conflict. Sporadically, Reynolds doesn’t even need that to further the plot. Instead, she simply decides that a certain character’s time is up and – ta-da – the hand comes off the truck, its game over, cheerio, goodbye, next chapter.
It must be said that – incredibly – the audience lapped it up, whooping and jeering along, laughing in all the right places and interacting with Tarrantesque host Phil ‘the Lip’ Daniels (Darren Strange) throughout. Admittedly, there are a couple of performances good enough to earn your sympathy; in particular, Gary Mackay as The Jokey one and Neil Jones as The Geeky One.
In short, just like the culture it sets out to satirise, Stand By Your Van is vacuous, tiresome and dumbed-down to stock. Upsettingly awful.
Photo property of Menagerie Theatre Company
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