Date Reviewed: 23rd November, 2008
Venue: Place Apartment Hotel

Shift working and  long -distance travel can destabilise sleep patterns. One of the challenges facing the audience in Black Tonic is working out the extent to which the actions of the characters are affected by their disrupted sleep. Our assessment is affected by the fact that the play is presented in such a way that we too experience the symptoms.

The jobs of the characters make it appropriate to stage Black Tonic not in a theatre but in the rooms and corridors of the Place Hotel. Lena (Magdalena Tuka) is a chambermaid working shifts in the hotel. Here she encounters Anna ( Katherine Maxwell-Cook) whom she blames for the loss of her lover. Lena fears that Anna is going to exert her malign influence over long distance traveller Steve ( Gareth Nicholls) and his partner Helen (Laura Ellison). Anna , insomniac and self-harming, clearly feels guilty about something and we have to work out her true motives.

The play requires  an unusual level of audience participation ranging from the usual one of observing and interpreting to more direct involvement of conversing and interacting with the characters. At times this involvement is secured in a natural manner.

From our hotel room we overhear Lena convey her suspicions to her supervisor Marie (Lou Platt). After interupting an argument we are taken to one side by Helen or Steve to hear their concerns or confessions. Other cues for participation, however, are more artificial. A telephone call urges us from room to corridor or we are just directed into a darkened room. It is a shame that these directions could not be more discrete (the telephone call could have been intended for another room but received by us in error) so as to maintain the illusion of spontaneous involvement. This occasional disjointed approach does, however, help us feel we are experiencing the type of confusion caused by destabilised  sleep patterns.

Director Katie Day lists theatre and hotels as her major passions . Yet the influences on Black Tonic seem cinematic rather than theatrical with the techniques of David Lynch being particularly apparent. The environment in which site-specific events  take place can create problems as well as generate benefits. Day not only avoids problems but uses the atmosphere of the hotel to exploit the  feeling you get in such locations  that something weird might be going on in the next room; and by  extension that strange things may be happening beneath the conventional surface of society as a whole.

Apart from Magdalena Tuka, who is given the chance to show different aspects of Lena,the actors are not really required to create characters. Their purpose is more to tell the story and convey the atmosphere of a waking dream – which they do very well. The story, by Clare Duffy,  is not entirely original – one recalls similar storylines in a tale by Stephen King and a film by David Fincher. Nevertheless the story is told in a very imaginative way and leads to a satisfying conclusion.

Black Tonic  might be a triumph of style over substance but it is very imaginative and a lot of fun.

-Dave Cunningham

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