Herding Cats

Synopsis

Funny, dark, gripping and intelligent, this powerful play by acclaimed playwright and screenwriter Lucinda Coxon, poignantly defines a generation. Balancing the cocktail of 21st century life and teasing relationships is as impossible as herding cats for Michael, Justine and Saddo. Justine has an infuriating new boss. Michael works from home, talking to strangers. Saddo is one of those strangers... All three are living a comic fiction in an attempt to avoid the facts. Teetering on the edge, all three are heading inexorably towards Christmas.

Our Review:

9 December 2011

It’s a long winter of dark mornings, dark evenings and desperate loneliness. Each evening flatmates Justine and Michael end up in their characterless white living room, drinking to forget. Justine plays an archetypal young professional; working hard, playing hard and hung up on an aging ex-hippie boss who both infuriates and fascinates her. She’s bored, stressed, confused and anonymous.

Michael acts as her sounding board; an agoraphobic who spends his days in the flat, he listens patiently to Justine as she violently extrapolates about her problems. In his free time, Michael pays the bills by taking calls as a woman on a sex chat line, pandering to the needs of lonely characters such as Saddo, an old Scottish man wanting to enact sadistic fantasies about his daughter.

This is an unrelenting 80 minutes from writer Lucinda Coxon, calculated to make the audience feel uncomfortable. It is without mercy that she systematically strips bare the dirty corners that...

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Latest User Review

steveatplays - 28 December 2011:

Lucinda Coxon examines our compartmentalised lives, jobs that bury our identities, bosses we loathe, fantasies we stifle, the phones we hide behind, and she sums up just how lonely all this can make us. It's a brilliant play, funny yet unremittingly bleak. It's knowing yet compassionate. It's not for Daily Mail readers. One character, Saddo, played with nuance by David Michaels, is a sadistic incestuous paedophile, but faking jollity in a Santa suit on Christmas day, even he evokes sympathy. He is perpetually filling the ear of phone sex worker, Michael, with his fantasies, and Michael, played by Philip McGinley with an empathetic centred calmness, begins to like him. Michael's flatmate, Justine, played by the underrated Olivia Hallinan (who expresses both subtle and fierce emotional changes on stage, moment to moment, every bit as convincingly as Judy Dench) also comes to like someone she initially hates, her boss, who we hear about but do not see. Coxon understands that if your life is barren enough, the things you hate can become the things you love: she emphasises this by depicting in the action a T-shirt in which the logo 'Love' humourously becomes the logo 'Hate' in a mirror's reflection. Just as public hatred for Jade Goody morphed with time into ubiquitous fondness, Michael and Justine equally become fond of characters they probably shouldn't. And just as in Jade Goody's case, that fondness ultimately proves troublesome. All three actors are fantastic, the production is stark and spooky, and Coxon's voice is pointed, hilarious and despairing. Excellent!...

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