It’s hard to review absurdist theatre. Any criticism you can throw at it, whether it’s about story, character or staging, can be rebuffed by the idea that experimentation and absurdism are just part of the genre. But you have to draw the line somewhere, and unfortunately Plays for a Poor Theatre at The Bread & Roses Theatre falls on the wrong side of it. There’s no doubt both writer Howard Brenton and director Connor Goodwin are being ironic in their defiance of convention, but that doesn’t save the play from being a bit of a slog to watch.
Plays for a Poor Theatre is a work of threes: three short pieces are presented to us by three performers (Ben Watts, Niamh Callan and Alex Morgan Edwards). Gum and Goo is about a spooky child who’s teased by the other kids and who wishes great violence upon her parents; this theme is brought back in the third play (The Education of Skinny Spew) as the protagonist narrates his sad childhood from infancy through to when he drowns his parents. The middle play, Heads, sees a woman’s tricky choice between two lovers lead to a particularly drastic (and of course, violent) solution.
There’s obviously a lot of darkness in all that, but it’s dialled up to an absurdist degree and never played particularly seriously. This only has the effect of removing any kind of real tension or thrill, while still leaving us with a sense of vague discomfort. If this discomfort is designed to reveal some greater truth about the world, it’s impossible to tell in amongst stories and characters that are stubbornly non‑conventional. The overall effect is that the plays are occasionally hard to follow and often not particularly compelling.
Plays for a Poor Theatre is at its best when it’s leaning into the comedy, which thankfully features more prominently in plays two and three, after a drearier start. But it’s a caricaturish, deliberately over‑egged type of humour that often grates, and sometimes falls into the very tropes it’s presumably trying to satirise (particularly in Heads, which flirts with gender politics).
Watts, Callan and Morgan Edwards make an admirable effort with the source material, giving exactly the kind of heightened performance the text warrants. But the exaggerated physicality and voice work is a bit of an onslaught. Combined with the almost total lack of props or costumes (the actors are clad in all black), it creates the sense that we’ve stumbled into some kind of actors’ workshop rather than a slick production ready for an audience.
Criticising shows at theatre pubs always feels a little mean. They’re an absolutely crucial creative space for emerging artists and experimental works, and that necessarily means they’ll feature misses as well as hits. (Plus, The Bread & Roses pub is a banging boozer.) But in honour of the sheer brilliance on offer at London’s theatre pubs, we have to be honest when one misses the mark, which is unfortunately the case with Plays for a Poor Theatre.
Listings and ticket information can be found here
