From the 3–7 March, Jack Studios will be home to the Linnet Theatre Company’s debut play, The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret. While the play starts out as a comedic tableau of the literal and figurative messiness that is student life, it quickly develops into a tense examination of whether people can truly escape their pasts.
Centred around a university flatshare kitchen, The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret opens exactly like any normal encounter in the first year of universit, playful, awkward and fuelled by a curiosity towards what happens next. Everything and everyone is unknown, and nothing underpins this more than the kitchen’s main focal piece: a permanently locked door leading to a mysteriously unoccupied sixth bedroom.
Over the course of their endless nights out, the group grows closer, but from the distance of the audience, there’s the jarring sense that this closeness is only shaking loose something ugly. The moments of comedy are ultimately uneasy, and the secrets every character seems to be holding back don’t feel sustainable. When it does implode, it does so enormously and unpredictably.
The least surprising part of the play is that two of the lead actors, Brodie Husband and George Ryder, were also the playwrights. Ryder shared that elements of the play speak to the loneliness and anxiety of their personal university experience, and throughout both the writing and the acting, there is detail and authenticity in how this is conveyed. Characters Henry and Luke, played by Husband and Ryder respectively, feel real, complex and simultaneously irritating and loveable in the way university flatmates often are.
This authenticity is true of the whole cast. The nuances of peppy yet perpetually nervous Charlotte are captured in impeccable detail by Katie Emanuel Emily Dilworth plays chaotic party girl Bex with such intuition that it is hard not to feel protective over the character; and Ollie J Edwards is haunting as Kane. The wallflower of the group, described as a “blank slate” by Henry, makes it impossible not to interpret Kane’s presence as eerie and omnipresent, not unlike the locked door behind the kitchen.
Such thoughtful characters may well have been better complemented by a more subtle ending. At the same time, the undercurrent of tension had to go somewhere, and there is the risk that giving a smaller ending to a story underpinned by so many secrets would fall flat. This choice makes The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret satisfying, yet it still piques the audience’s hunger for more: a second watch, another act or even a glimpse of the characters’ lives years later.
Listings and ticket information can be found here
