Theatre Review: Seven Year Twitch (Orange Tree)

Simon Mattacks and Johanna Tincey in Seven Year Twitch (Photo: Robert Day)

Tweet tweet. If Woody Allen, Alan Ayckbourn and Mike Leigh joined forces to guest-write an episode of HBO’s In Treatment then it’s possible that the end result might be something like Seven Year Twitch, the lamely named but rather enjoyable new comedy from writer/director David Lewis, which has just opened at the Orange Tree. Like Lewis’s last play, the excellent How to be Happy, Seven Year Twitch is another relationship roundelay of marital discord, this time filtered through two key elements: psychotherapy and -yup - bird-watching. It’s a “shrink-rapt” comedy, you might say: sometimes sketchy and undeveloped, not entirely satisfying in the end, yet full of funny moments and engagingly tart exchanges scene by scene.

The plot concerns two therapists – colleagues and former paramours – and their intricately interconnected clientele. In the first scene, Megan (Lucy Tregear) is counselling the nervy Ben (Paul O’Mahony), a charity worker, who, following a confession of impotence, recounts an embarrassing incident at a dinner party hosted by Fran (Amanda Royle). The focus then shifts to Fran during a session with her analyst Charlie (Paul Kemp), in which she bemoans the obsessive tendencies of her competitive “twitcher” spouse Terry (Simon Mattacks) who’d missed said dinner party due to an impromptu bird-watching expedition. Dissatisfied with his profession these days, Charlie’s own marriage to Karen (Kate Miles) is also going through a sticky patch, wouldn’t you know. Karen is lusted after by Megan, who, at Charlie’s behest, ends up taking on Terry as a patient. Terry then falls for a fellow twitcher, Jill (Johanna Tincey). Further complications ensue.

Seven Year Twitch plays as an ever-escalating relay of comic high anxiety, in which the characters go through so many surprise shifts in erotic attachment that they could be auditioning for an appearance in an Iris Murdoch novel. Punchier and more profane than Ayckbourn, Lewis is great at depicting moments of social awkwardness. And - as the writer of a play about Feydeau - he doesn’t fear pushing the action into full-blown farce either – notably in a terrific sequence that finds Terry sheltering in a chair-hide in the living room while his randy wife enjoys herself in front of him with a new lover on the floor.

Yet Lewis’s production delivers moments of repose and reflection too; these rub up nicely against the broader episodes and mitigate the more contrived and schematic aspects of the plotting. (As in How to be Happy, a character’s classical music fixation once again helps to supply a melancholy undertow, and here allows for an understated, but very beautiful, close to the first half.) While there’s nothing very novel about the play’s notion that shrinks are every bit as screwed up as their clients, Seven Year Twitch is nonetheless at its sharpest on patient/therapist dynamics and the diverse contours of such relationships, which we see shifting, variously, from cool professionalism to irritation by way of sympathetic interest and even tenderness.



Paul O'Mahony in Seven Year Twitch (Photo: Robert Day)



The incidents described by the patients slide fluidly into flashbacks, with the same events sometimes shown from contrasting perspectives. But fortunately the play doesn’t get stuck on a tedious Intimate Exchanges/Constellations-style track of endless variations. Nor does it offer the obvious satirical stance on therapy that you might anticipate. Rather, the various theories that Megan and Charlie proffer regarding their clients’ behaviour can sound equal parts convincing and glib. Lewis allows the audience to make up its own mind on that score, and once again gives each of his protagonists a measure of awareness and self-delusion. Analogies between birdy and human behaviour crop up, but the playwright ensures that these aren’t hammered home in the way that the corny title suggests that they might be; there’s not even a shag gag to be heard.

The play’s structure means that we get told an awful lot about the characters, some of which isn’t exactly demonstrated by what we see. But perhaps this disjuncture is part of the point. After all, Seven Year Twitch is mostly concerned with the misunderstandings that occur within relationships, with faulty perception of others, and how gestures and actions can be misinterpreted. That’s the source of the play’s sadness - and also of its comedy. (One thing comes through clearly, though: however well intentioned, it’s probably never a good idea to present your wife with a dead bird - rare or not - as a peace-offering.)



Amanda Royle in Seven Year Twitch (Photo: Robert Day)



If there’s a problem here it’s that Lewis throws a few too many elements into the mix and struggles to juggle them, with the result that the play doesn’t snap together as satisfyingly as How to be Happy did. Too many traumas end up getting tossed around - abortions, alcoholic and absent parents, dead infants and a heap of Daddy issues - and some of the musings fail to convince. Charlie’s ranty theory on gender roles sounds rehearsed, while Fran’s tirade against consumerism (though better made) might have been drawn directly from Lewis’s previous play. And though all of the actors deliver sharp, well-defined performances - with especially fine work from Tregear and Royle (the latter a dead ringer for Lesley Manville here) - a couple of characters go to waste, feeling less fully integrated into the plot than they might have been.

Despite these shortcomings, there’s much to enjoy in Seven Year Twitch and much to admire about Lewis’s writing, in particular the way it doesn’t take the obvious route: the play spends a lot of time seeming to edge two of its characters towards each other, for example, and then completely subverts that expectation at the end. Relationships in Lewisland are incomplete, messy, frustrating affairs, resisting closure and final “analysis.” Still, for all the cynicism about human interaction that’s expressed, Lewis manages to end the play on a moment of possibility and openness, with the potential beginning of something. Two people face each other in a room once again. One encourages the other into intimacy with two simple, precious yet also deadly words: “I’m listening.”

The production runs until 22 June.

Theatre Review: How To Be Happy (Orange Tree Theatre)

Two households, both with the same settee. A settee that gets lolled on, cried on, argued on, walked on and shagged on over the course of David Lewis’s lively and thoughtful new play at Richmond’s Orange Tree. Directed by its author, How To Be Happy unfolds in a series of overlapping, parallel scenes that take place in the separate - yet deeply interconnected - homes of Emma (Kate Miles) and Paul (Paul Kemp), a divorced couple now living with their new partners Graham (Steven Elder) and Katy (Carolyn Backhouse).

Each couple has its problems. Paul, a struggling writer, has been diagnosed with lung cancer, while Graham and Emma’s relationship is undergoing strain, not helped by the presence of a very vocal new baby. Meanwhile, Graham, an advertising executive who’s currently (and hilariously) “brainstorming notions of happiness” in order to best promote a new chocolate bar, wants Paul to collaborate on the campaign. Flitting between the two houses, and delivering sometimes indiscreet dispatches from each, is Paul and Emma’s teenage daughter Daisy (Kate Lamb), who’s harbouring hopes of bringing her parents back together.

At first, Lewis’s conceit of having the two families simultaneously occupy the same space in overlapping scenes feels clunky and obtrusive. But the structure moves into elegance as the evening progresses, creating some effective juxtapositions between the events in the two households: rhyming incidents of domestic discord and complicity. The relationships are, for the most part, sharply drawn, and just when you think Lewis is about to take a swerve into sentimentality you’re surprised by some unanticipated twist or acerbic observation.

The thematic focus of How To Be Happy is - you guessed! - the concept of happiness, and, in particular, its relationship to consumerism. Paul (in one of the play’s improbabilities, or, at least, its heavy-handed ironies) once wrote a self-help book on the subject of happiness and has worked in the advertising industry himself. But he has now come to disdain Graham’s profession, which he views as responsible for the sorry state of a society in which people feel pressured “to spend money they don’t have to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.”

What’s most admirable about Lewis’s writing, though, is that it refuses to employ the characters simply as one-dimensional representations of a particular idea. Rather, the people here are believably inconsistent muddles of contradictions, each with his or her measure of awareness and neurosis.

Graham may represent the horrors of consumer capitalism to Paul, but Steven Elder’s expert performance presents Graham as a rather ineffectual man, affable and eager to please, and nursing his own sense of futility and disillusionment. (It’s not until the end that we see a trace of steeliness.) Similarly, Paul’s rants against consumerism are, as his ex-wife points out, somewhat undermined by his own attachment to his iPhone.

The raspy-voiced Paul Kemp doesn’t fall into the trap of trying to make the disappointed, rather whiny Paul too sympathetic or easily appealing, and the other roles are played with equal bite. As Emma, Kate Miles brilliantly conveys the insecurity and frustration of a woman who’s walked away from one unsatisfactory marriage only to find herself in another. And although the characterisation of Daisy takes an unfortunate late slide into psychobabble, Kate Lamb (a young actress to watch) is spot-on as the daddy’s girl.

Some moments fail to completely convince - the growing intimacy between Graham and Katy, in particular - and the play’s contemporary allusions - Lady Gaga, The X Factor - occasionally feel pat. But Lewis’s spry production nicely conveys the shifts in tone of his writing, as the mood moves from broad comedy to contemplation, with the action underscored by classical pieces that range from jaunty, brisk baroque to the intense drama of Schubert’s Winterreise (“a good break-up CD,” in Paul’s definition). And the production’s truly delicious closing moments, which leave one character alone on stage and make the best use of The Ronettes’s “Be My Baby” since the opening of Scorsese’s Mean Streets, are perfectly judged. Lewis’s play has its glib and undeveloped elements, but at its best it reflects wittily and poignantly on the way we live now.

The production runs for 2 hours 20 minutes and is booking until November 5. Further information at the Orange Tree website.

 
 
Reviewed for British Theatre Guide.