Anthony Neilson’s Realism premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival two years after The Wonderful World of Dissocia and is, more or less, the same play with the volume turned down. Mind you, given Neilson’s explosive style, that’s rather like a sonic boom heard through earplugs.
Realism uses the same hallucinogenic technique as The Wonderful World, swapping Lisa’s dissociative disorder for Tim Treloar’s blue funk. (Treloar keeps his real name, so in the original production, the same ‘character’ was called Stuart McQuarrie.) Nursing both a hangover and a heartache, Treloar opts to spend his Saturday slobbing around his flat alone. In his pants.
However, his restful day off soon sinks into restless off-day, as that most masculine of traits, sentimental self-pity, takes hold. The fragments of his imagination – parents, ex-partners and pop cultural icons – leap out of his brain and into his living room. They spring from the bin and burst out of the washing machine. A giant carrot drops from the ceiling. Sand trickles down. Black and white minstrels troop out of his fridge. His cat gets home and gives him what for. They goad, scold and titillate, shunting him into a mix of nostalgic remorse and morbid angst, until we finally see his jubilant funeral.
In Steve Marmion’s production, all this is great fun to watch. The various phantasmagoria have a Boosh-like brashness; each bounces around the set with a Tiggerish energy. Enjoyable as it is, the production gets carried away and lacks the discipline to carry off Neilson’s more reprimanding intentions. It misses the darker shadows and sharper edges that make Tim’s thought-cyclone so unhealthy. Nothing comes with haunting menace or tips into mania. It’s all a little upbeat and wacky, dare I say, a little CBBC.
That’s largely down to Marmion’s tendency towards archetype. Treloar, for example, offers a stereotypically Neanderthal version of arse-scratching, lesbian-loving, knuckle-dragging masculinity. The role strikes me as more complex: softer, though still infused with the masculine. There is both fussiness and an ungrudging domesticity, hence the genuine irritation at a sock left out of the washing machine, the initial politeness to a cold-caller and the constant parental presence.
Likewise, Rocky Marshall plays the best friend with a wahey and a leer, where there is something tender about the concern shown. Marshall plays it a touch mockingly, almost cruelly, with too much oh-get-over-yourself impatience. Together it’s too strongly laddish, too Men Behaving Badly, for the depressive side to come through.
That the layer of objective reality is already halfway to its inflated fantasy prevents Marmion from achieving the bleak emptiness of Tim’s inactivity. The actual is heightened, where it needs be humdrum. Beautiful though his design is, the usually excellent Tom Scutt must take some blame, since the flat is already vibrantly cartoonish: block colours and bold outlines. Here, the two levels fuse too easily. It also furthers the cheery quality. As with the playing style, the design needs Dali’s disorientation rather than pop art’s brightness. (To be fair, Scutt is somewhat constrained by the Soho theatre’s inability to follow Neilson’s original ending and fly in the realistic kitchen-sink set to finish.)
Nonetheless, Neilson’s text is strong enough that the (well-worn) ideas about universally-felt anxiety and insignificance survive in tact. More importantly, so does the basic subversion of his title, which knocks naturalistic theatre out of the park. This is real life, Jim, exactly as we know – and live – it. It’s no Wonderful World, but it’ll just about do.
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