Reviews

Reverie

Pleasance Dome
4-30 August, 17.40

If we could control our dreams, relive favourite memories and
create new ones, would reality become worthless? Tom Crawshaw (author
of 2009’s excellent Play On Words) poses this
question in this quasi-philosophical exploration of lucid dreaming.

Yaz Al-shateer is an engaging lead, journeying into
depths of his own mind. And, but for the unfortunate coincidental
timing of Christopher Nolan’s Inception, there are
interesting and original questions as he relives and recreates an old
love affair, destroying all ‘real’ relationships.

There’s a brilliant play here, and Three’s Company are
an extraordinarily talented and inventive company, but it never gets
off the ground in a clunkily staged – and often clunkily performed by
the supporting cast – production, marred by an intrusive use of
projection and failure to hit the timing quite right. Crawshaw’s script
feels like a first draft brimming with possibilities, rather than the
polished, dense work he’s produced in the past.

– Will Young