Super

Two friends Phoenix (Lucy Ansell) and Nel (Laila Thaker) have superpowers – although not of the Marvel variety: Phoenix can suck the anger out of fraught situations and calm things down.  Nel has preternatural admin powers and can sort out the problems and spreadsheets of struggling fledgeling clubs and associations.  Both are idealists who want to ‘do good’ and change the world. They want others who have their own superpowers and with similar motives to join them.  Only Rae (Caroline Rae), a washed-up TV chef, shows up.  Nel is awed – Rae is a celebrity – but Phoenix suspends judgement.  One of the nice ironies of Super – and strengthened by Ansell’s riveting stage presence – is that supposed peacemaker and calming influence Phoenix is perpetually angry, grumpy, suspicious, and, finally, violent.  Meanwhile, gushing humble Nel – Thaker is very funny in that iteration – becomes authoritarian and Caroline Lee’s Rae arrives with great style and panache only to become pathetic. 

Rae cries a lot – uncontrollably it seems, but she can induce weeping in others – either because of mass sorrow, or shame, or guilt...  She too longs to do good – that’s why she’s joined the other two – but she doesn’t know how...  She tells a story of her television cooking show being cancelled when she suggests a new direction for it: Chutney.  In a reaction familiar to those of us who’ve worked in television, the execs tell her no, that doesn’t fit the demographic and they’re going in a new direction...  Curiously, and I hope this is not a spoiler, Rae tells this story again at the end of the play, suggesting a circular structure for this cautionary tale giving it a heightened, surreal quality.

The three women form a kind of do-gooder triumvirate that involves much bickering, a hierarchical structure, confessions, costume changes, chaos and the messing up of Romanie Harper’s amazing and initially pristine set.  Unfortunately, perhaps, while the interactions amongst the three are dramatised, their activities and unsuccessful interactions elsewhere are can only be reported. 

Nevertheless, what Collier seems to say to us is that the common impulse – or desire – to do good (unexamined and undefined) and change the world can be in itself frustrating and ultimately a trap.  Rae’s tears continue, Nel’s superpower becomes total control-freakery and bullying, and Phoenix attacks those she has ‘calmed’, hurling their own violence back at them.

I am, I confess, making a number of inferences here since much of the developing action – on stage and off – is sometimes baffling and bewildering.  Perhaps if director Emma Valente had had more trust in the material, things might not have moved at such a relentlessly frenetic pace, leaving us struggling in its wake.   

In her program note and a pre-premiere video statement, Emilie Collyer tells us that the genesis of Super was as far back as 2017, but that it has considerably changed since then due to her powerful life experiences, periods where she left the play aside, and then the input and encouragement of many supporters and collaborators, and its finally being workshopped within the Red Stitch INK program. 

It does seem to me, however, that Super, while positively bristling with insights, comedy, ideas and the playwright’s own varied and changing motives for proceeding with it, has become a series of fanciful, unanchored moments and set pieces.  And that’s despite the more or less clear trajectory of defeat and decline.

Things do settle into moments of striking clarity, but there are elements – some undeniably sharp, clear and powerful – that are included for their own sake with tenuous thematic connection to the whole.  The three wonderful, highly talented actors - all with fine comedy skills too - work hard to pull it all together but the feeling at the end is that the audience is puzzled and has possibly disengaged. 

Michael Brindley  

Photographer: Cameron Grant, Parenthesy