Preview: Play On (Nicholson Square Venues)

Escape room drama with untapped potential

If you have ever participated in an escape room, then you know that they aren't typically playful. They can be stressful, divisive, and even euphoric, but rarely playful, and that is especially true for the two siblings in Erin Boulter’s Play On. Ash (Boulter) and Lea (Rebekka Pewterbaw) have barely left their mother’s funeral when they are told that to find their mother’s will, they must complete an escape room, one which is full of family references and Shakespearean puzzles. It is an appealing premise and a great excuse to lock two estranged characters in a room. The play will perform at the Edinburgh Fringe in August, but I was invited to this script-in-hand preview to see their work in progress.

At first, like many meetings with much-avoided family members, exchanges are short, irritable, and unyielding. In the second part, they start to gain some momentum, cracking puzzles and spouting Shakespeare monologues they have known since childhood. Finally, we get to the meat of the matter, picking apart where their relationship fell apart and the grudges they still hold. Although each part has a purpose and some highlights, the blocky nature of the structure becomes stifling. The final scene is fantastic at opening up the relationship between the two, but it is so highly concentrated it is overwhelming compared to what has come before it. Similarly, it is hard to see how the puzzles and the Shakespearean themes and imagery inform the characters and the story when it feels so separate and contained.

So Lea and Ash are rather detached from their Shakespearean namesakes – Ophelia from Hamlet and Sabastian from Twelfth Night (no, I’m not sure how you get Ash from that either). All the same, they have a very believable sibling bond. Ash is bratty, torn between the expectations of their family and forging their own path as a queer person. Lea is their straight-laced, tightly-wound older sister, burdened with responsibility. Both feel like fully-fleshed characters, retreating to the habits and personas they forged as children. You find yourself switching sides between them as they fight, which is a real strength of Boulter's writing. Boulter and Pewterbaw give good performances, and with more rehearsal to make their exchanges feel spontaneous their chemistry will bloom even more. It is a little hard to understand the structure of their family – we hear about biological mothers and absent fathers, but I felt like I needed a family tree printout to keep up. Even so, this is a play and a theatre maker with great potential, and it will be exciting to see how this project takes shape come the Fringe.

Play On will perform at Paradise in the Vault at 13:05 from the 13th to the 24th of August