DARK LAUGHS BUT NOT QUITE THE FINISHED ARTICLE
A reporter comes face to face with a notorious criminal... and yet their story feels incomplete
These are not good times for launching new works for the stage, but journalist Jason O’Toole has met the problem half-way with his play The Intruder, performed as a rehearsed reading, now playing on the Hot Press’s YouTube channel. He had originally hoped to open it in Theatre503 in London, that specialises in new writers but that plan, like many others in the past year, fell through.
The three performers sit at separate tables without props or scenery so the drama has to be propelled purely by their voices, facial expressions and hand gestures. Stage directions are read in voice-over by Stephen Jones.
The scenario treads the familiar path of the unwanted, uninvited visitor, arriving mysteriously in the house of the unnamed coke-addicted crime reporter (Rex Ryan) a passionate student of serial killers.
The mask-wearing visitor is a notorious criminal (Jason Barry), nicknamed Old Nick by the reporter, which particularly annoys Nick, who’s very fastidious about the use of names and language.
Nick, armed and ready for action, is there to take sophisticated revenge against the reporter who has built his reputation on exposing criminals. Nick regularly parades his command of language and synonyms, in particular complaining about his ‘nickname, soubriquet and nom de plume’ and dropping quotes in French, while disparaging the reporter’s use of English.
That dialogue, mixed with the reporter’s inevitable replies of writing ‘what’s in the public interest’ and having ‘usually reliable sources’, provides some good humorous moments as the pair spar with each other, and it could have given the play a tighter focus.
It seemed at first that it might be a comic exploration of who is the worst intruder, the uninvited Nick or the reporter who spends his life intruding into other people’s lives.
And the first act keeps its focus, but after the interval the play, having used the idea of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire well, loses direction and becomes a mixture of Tales Of The Unexpected and Alfred Hitchcock Presents without coming to a satisfactory conclusion.
The introduction of Charlene Gleeson as an unlikely ‘barrister’
The first act keeps its focus but after the interval the play loses direction’
doesn’t help. She’s not properly integrated into the plot, and her use of a four-letter vocabulary makes her too similar to the other two. Raising a discussion on transgenderism and the number of people needed for an orgy, has humorous possibilities, but is also an unnecessary distraction.
The over-use of expletives is tiresome. Drawn as a suave character with a sinister aura, Nick would be a better contrast with the reporter than having the two of them effin’ and blindin’.
It’s hard to go wrong with two fine performers like Jason Barry and Rex Ryan, and there’s some good comic material here, but the final fully-staged version will need a bloody-minded script editor to hammer it into shape.
■ OperaVision (OV) is a free opera-streaming platform, launched in 2017, showcasing opera, music theatre and ballet productions from 28 theatres in 17 different European countries.
Every month, a number of performances and exclusive premieres allow worldwide audiences to discover opera and dance at the highest level, for free. There are usually four streams every month on the non-comercial venture, and all performances have subtitles. This month, the productions include St John Passion (JS Bach), Lucia di Lammermoor (Staatsoper, Hamburg) and Don Giovanni (National Theatre Prague) from June 18.
All information, productions, news, conversations and introductions to the operas are available at operavision.eu.