And just what was all that about? Alright, so sometimes you come out of a play thinking that if you'd paid a little more attention you'd have got more out of it. But with Apple (a new play by Helena Thompson aged 21) it seems unlikely that anyone, even with a script in their hands and the director sitting beside them explaining the more complicated parts, would know what was going on.
Apple sells itself as a tragic drugs story. As far as I can tell (but this could be wrong) there are two boys, one dressed in black and one in white, who are friends, and take drugs together. Where the "tragic" comes in we're not sure: no one seems to be dead by the end, although who knows? There's a bloke who has branches stuck to his coat, and calls himself the tree of knowledge. He hands out an apple at one point, so that must be why the play is called Apple. Sort of a metaphor for drugs, like.
Right. We're getting somewhere. There's a girl called Hyacinth Girl. One of the boys might be in love with her, and the other one definitely is, and she gets pregnant - we think. Sometimes the lights strobe and sometimes they don't, and occasionally a member of the cast says a sentence that makes sense, but mostly they don't. In the programme notes, Thompson tells us she's "taking a younger look at an older problem by exploring what questions the rituals of today's youth could be struggling to answer". The problem is we can't understand her contorted answers. "I'm sure I'm conforming to some well-worn thought," says one character. "Go on, deaden my comprehension."
These characters are completely lost, we don't know who they are and the actors (all young and trying hard) don't have much of a clue either. After Hyacinth girl has had an abortion, she tells boy-in-black: "I'll abort. Have aborted." He answers (and any sane woman would surely clock him for this): "Yourself or the baby?"
References to Beckett, quotes from Shakespeare and discussions about God all increase the effect of a play that has overreached itself. The blocking was good though. And we liked some of the music.
Till September 19. Box office: 0171-482 4857.
