Review: Hot Mess, Hawke & Hunter

Written for Culture Wars

Are we twenty-somethings really as schizophrenic as Ella Hickson diagnoses in this cute, but astute, contemporary folk tale? Presenting two twins, the one the inverse of the other, Hickson paints a picture of a generation struggling with its oxymoronic nature, caught between savage cynicism and wispy romanticism. The choice seems one of armour-plated self-preservation or an exposed underbelly ripe for the sticking. Either path – let alone a confused combination of the two – leaves us ill-equipped for life.

Polo and Twitch, brother and sister, were born with one heart between them. That wound up in Twitch’s chest, leaving Polo with a cavity at his core. Where she falls too readily, at, say, the merest meeting of eyes across a crowded dance floor, he is incapable of love, perhaps even of empathy. They’re both realised with composed verve by the marshmallow soft Gwendolen Chatfield and Michael Whitham, who grounds Polo’s acidity in his own scars.

As the twins approach their twenty-fifth birthday, Twitch finds herself in a tender, but doomed, relationship with Billy (Solomon Mousley), while Polo and his neon-horror of a fag-hag Jax (Kerri Hall) can offer only snide sneers at the world rotating around them.

Even if Hickson sometimes overplays her hand – the neatness can become a touch sickly and the constant oppositions stick in your throat – she handles her narrative exceptionally, keeping us engrossed. There’s real smoothness to her dialogue as well. It’s entirely apt, for example, that the quixotic Twitch is quick to translate life into metaphors and similes, where Polo snaps forth blunt realities best left unspoken. Just occasionally, when the four characters deliver interlocking monologues into empty space, Hot Mess drifts towards Royal Court cliché, Crimp-Kane sort of territory. That is, however, as much the fault of the design (the play is performed in the modish but shallow nighclub that inspired it) as it is of Hickson’s text.

However, Hot Mess is a cracking watch, wonderfully light without losing its density. Further proof, if it were needed, of Hickson’s knack for taking the temperature of the times and catching the mood her contemporaries.