I blame Alan Bennett. The Yorkshire writer’s achingly humane 1980s Talking Heads monologues for supposedly “ordinary” characters have inspired countless others to pen inferior soliloquies highlighting unexplored lives. This wispy, 65-minute solo show from Michael Wynne is a case in point, charting the slow collapse of a working-from-home IT specialist whose only companion is a large cactus called Clive.
BAFTA and Olivier winner Wynne, performer Paul Keating and director Lucy Bailey all have proven theatrical track records but here serve up a production that’s pitifully thin and unconvincing. Even the deployment of the cactus as a proxy, to explain why this character is speaking to us – like Wilson the basketball for Tom Hanks in Cast Away – doesn’t really work.
Its subject, Thomas, is an assemblage of cliches, a curtain-twitching clean-freak who obsessively bleaches and vacuums his all-white canalside flat. A mummy’s boy, he was bullied at school and by his dad for being gay before he’d even realised it himself. His gossipy reminiscences about office bake-offs and chats by the “coffee-woffee” machine sound rose-tinted from the start.
His work is clearly his life but he now interacts solely with colleagues through a screen: he’s trouserless and mostly barefoot throughout but puts a tie on for video meetings. (Covid, weirdly, is never mentioned: everyone at Thomas’s company is just suddenly WFH after a restructuring.) He spies on but doesn’t speak to his neighbours. Moments where he’s seen playing violent video games or dancing lewdly for Clive hint further at his loneliness.
The spiky, alien succulent – metaphor klaxon! – was the gift of an Australian ex he loved but lost through his chronic unadventurousness. In a classic case of telling us rather than showing us, Thomas explains several times that he’s happiest interacting with machines: his phone, laptop and the Amazon Echo that controls his lights, living-room soundscape and blinds. First humans, then technology, and eventually even his houseplant desert him.
I’ve lost count of the number of monologues I’ve seen that rely for dramatic impetus on stripping the character of everything he or she holds dear, including dignity. (The benchmark was the mawkish Sleeping with Mickey, about a bereaved woman who has a futile fling with the actor playing Mickey Mouse at Disney World, for which I was the sole audience member at the 350-seat Arts Theatre one night back in the Nineties.)
Where Bennett generates empathy for his characters, there’s something calculating, even sadistic, in the way his emulators degrade their creations. It’s hard to warm to Thomas with his fussy prattle and OCD tendencies, and therefore hard to care about him. Keating plays him with an over-emphatic physicality which leaves him drenched in sweat in the Arcola’s hotbox studio theatre.
It doesn’t feel like Wynne has any serious points to make about the precarity or isolation of contemporary life. Bailey’s production is capable but fails to instil purpose in the material. The set, by Mark Britton, is a saving grace, a sleek vinyl floor with a wall of matching, light-up cupboards. But it’s a poor show when the designer comes off best.
Clive at Arcola Theatre, until August 23, tickets and information here.
