Review: Company Along the Mile
January 27, 2009
Date reviewed: 23 January 2009
Venue: West Yorkshire Playhouse
Tom Bidwell doesn’t lack ambition. For his first full-length play, he has written a piece that effectively consists of two extended scenes inhabited by three characters without an interval. Not only this, but he cited Harold Pinter, Joe Orton and Tennessee Williams as the writers from whom he took inspiration. However, it’s fair to say that Company Along the Mile is in little danger of approaching the sort of hubris that might lead some of the country’s less restrained student theatre companies to ask for its hand in marriage. It is, after all, a personable comedy set in a Blackpool hotel room.
One of the bulkiest obstacles for Bidwell, director Justin Audibert and actors Dominic Gately and Toby Sawyer alike is to convince the audience that the two protagonists could ever be found interacting with one another under the circumstances that the play envisions. Both are natives of the city: one a straight-talking bloke whose lack of palpable achievement has seemingly bred insecurity (George, played by Gately) and the other a verbally athletic, affectionately flirtatious transvestite (Stella, played by Sawyer). They meet each Wednesday, when Stella pays George to sit in her hotel room bed with her in his boxer shorts.
The hurdle is negotiated more successfully in some respects than others. Bidwell’s eye for detail helps bring a sense of reality. The play opens, for example, with a battle over a radio in which George’s desire to hear commentary on Blackpool FC is eventually overcome by Stella’s preference for the unadulterated sound of her own voice. Likewise, Stella’s fascination with triangular sandwiches and George’s decision to leave the toilet door open while he sits and reads the obituaries do much to develop the characters from the stereotypes that Bidwell has obviously used as his starting point. Furthermore, Gately is an agitated George whose persistent strutting underlines his general dissatisfaction well, while Sawyer’s Stella is, suitably, grating yet difficult to dislike.
However, the tacit premise that George uses the money to justify an arrangement that he likes, but is unable to admit that he likes, to himself struggles to hold. That George frequently wants Stella to shut up is entirely believable; that this masks a deep-seated fondness that he isn’t comfortable with is less so. At one point George admits that Stella is one of the few people that really understand him, but it’s much easier to imagine him saying this about an equally downbeat, conversationally economical pub buddy. A dull and shallow reality this may be, but you can’t abandon dull, shallow realities in a play that’s supposed to coax humour from facets of common experience.
This isn’t to say that Company Along the Mile isn’t funny. Parts of it are witty and perceptive. At one point, the personal ads in George’s newspaper are decoded and, though this might sound like a predictable avenue of amusement, it’s done so incisively that the audience emits an avalanche of laughter concluded by a brief but vigorous round of applause. George’s erratic rapport with the Bell Boy (the play’s only other character, played by John Catterall), much of which revolves around the latter’s delight in confusing the former, is helpful in this respect.
However, the most compelling parts of the play are the clashes that George has, first with Stella and then the Bell Boy. There are hints of the one-upmanship and implicitly adversarial communication for which Pinter’s dialogue is famous. Stella and George’s relationship gains much of its complexity and those elements of believability that it has much more from its stinging, combative side than its cute, eccentric one.
Company Along the Mile, then, sees funny and psychologically astute writing stifled by some rickety foundations. Though periodically genuinely funny and with patches of masterly tension, it is a little far-fetched and, at times, simply a little too nice. It is, however, directed and acted in confident ways that accentuate its humour. I can’t help feeling, though, that Bidwell’s evident talent would be better deployed if he were writing about something a bit more normal.
-Simon Walker
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