Realism: A Mixed Bag

By Jonathan Jones

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

The revival of Anthony Nielson’s Realism at the Soho Theatre was indeed an example of a promising work, executed as a largely missed opportunity. While the idea behind the work was quite strong (a man sits alone in his apartment for a day and all the thoughts he has come to life around him, no matter how abstract or culled directly from his memory), yet the execution was too realistic to allow the work to really live as fully as it might. Given the circumstances of the play, I would have liked to have seen a much more expressionistic take in the production. There was one moment where a character crawled out of the television set, and given his physicality, I was immediately reminded of Tim Burton’s work in Beetlejuice and I spent some significant time waiting for the walls to fly away and reveal the darker and more discombobulated recesses of the man’s mind. This never happened. Further, a number of scenes are supposed to happen in real time in the midst of the imaginings, yet the director here (Steve Marmion, also artistic director of the Soho Theatre) did not effectively distinguish between the real the surreal, at one pivotal point near the close of the play, he even inadvertently reversed the two. This unfortunately made for an extraordinary unsympathetic character who, while charming at times, deserved only the misery that his inner thinking displayed, yet he was forgiven for his shortcomings in an unfortunate way by another character. A mixed bag for sure, but plenty to chew on and worthy of new directors working to take the drama in many more interesting directions.