Gloria

This is the second play written by the celebrated director Benedict Andrews, now running a global career from Iceland.  Critics shredded his first play, Every Breath at Belvoir, about an indulged, bullying family living behind top security.

In Gloria, this time a star actress (Marta Dusseldorp) and her fractious family live high in a penthouse as a dystopian city below explodes into civic mayhem.

Andrews’ witty and droll observations of interpersonal/generational relations underpin Gloria’s story, her oddly bumbling IT husband Derek (Huw Higginson), his brash daughter Maddie (Chloe Bayliss) and Gloria’s own rebellious son Jared (Meyne Wyatt).   Kristy Best plays a young call girl hosting clients (Pierce Wilcox) in a neighbouring apartment.  The characters may be safe from the fires below, but all are corroded by some entrapment, fear or sexual perversity.

On Sophie Fletcher’s sophisticated but agile set, embedded security screens dramatically show the mayhem below.  But the threat hits home when Gloria’s risks an adventurous new stage role – playing a real life young victim who was entrapped and abused in a cellar by her father. This drives Gloria (and the play) into hyper-hysteria. 

Through her drunken nightmares, time shifts, we meet earlier reincarnations of husband and children, and actors inexplicably slip into yet other characters.   What begins as a fragmentary, poetic play, artfully choreographed by Lee Lewis, slides from engaging into incomprehensible.  

Later our interest is restored by delightful meta-theatre scenes where the actors play themselves at the Griffin waiting to go on – and angrily arguing if Gloria is well enough to carry tonight’s show.  While it’s a wicked comment on the futility of theatre, it sidelines any passion we presume Andrews really feels about those images of a dystopian world.

The performances are spirited and necessarily agile, although at the centre a surprisingly arch Dusseldorp is yet to fully inhibit Gloria’s voyage into hysteria.  Andrews gives her little help.

Martin Portus