Review: 'Paradise'

By Alex Gordon.

Before reading my review, listen to our exclusive preview of the production.

Paradise is a play with potential. It did not seem to me however, ready to be presented to a paying student audience. It is a one-man show written and directed by Christian Smith and performed by Howard Thompson. It presents us with a sad, frustrated, sardonic individual named Ricky who tells us about aspects of his life and why he feels it has gone wrong. Ricky narrates his story with a cutting, often dark sense of humour and moments of existential pondering.

It is performed on a completely bare stage, save for one chair in the centre where Ricky sits broodingly, as the audience enter. This starkness, jarring at first, pulled our focus immediately onto Ricky and made sure it stayed there; no distractions of set, lighting or sound, just one man and what he has to say.

Smith’s writing showed promise in places. Ricky’s speech alternates between personal anecdotes and bitter asides to the audience, interspersed with moments of comical, often bleak insight into the student condition (Ricky reveals he is at York University), and some witty manipulation of language.

However, the play simply doesn’t have enough content to stand up on its own. Many of the jokes seemed recycled – he talks repeatedly about how awful the North of England is, a reference that grows tiresome after a while – or not strong enough to provoke great laughter from the audience; Ricky’s rantings about the apparent racism of Dolmio adverts and the pointlessness of condoms felt more like an attempt at stand-up rather than giving us any great insight into his character.

This, combined with its incredibly short length of 27 minutes meant that I neither sympathised with Ricky as a person nor understood just why, in the end, he was so depressed. The play just didn’t seem to have a coherent development or any clear resolution, which left me dissatisfied as an audience member.

Howard Thompson gave a commendable performance as Ricky. He displayed dynamism and vigour, exploiting his vocal capabilities to good effect in Ricky’s more incensed passages.  This contrasted nicely with a great pensiveness during his more self-reflective moments. Thompson’s performance though, could only be so good due to the material.

I felt the play either needed to be twice its length, or teamed with a series of similar monologues from different characters on the subjects that this one covers, such as the student experience, or how we all, as people, share a loneliness and insecurity which we never admit to. Themes which Smith seemed to be able to tap into, but never seemed to go further than just skimming the surface.

Paradise would have been perfect material as a work-in-progress piece for an Open Drama Night on a Monday evening. I do not feel though that, in its current form, the Drama Society should be putting it on and be expecting audiences, students or otherwise, to pay to come and see it. It does not represent value for money.

You can hear Alex’s full audio review today at 2 inYorWorld.