Conversation killer
Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons at Modern Art Oxford from April 5-9
RONIN Theatre, a company that stages revivals of contemporary theatre, brought Sam Steiner’s clever play Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons to the intimate surroundings of Modern Art Oxford’s foyer.
The central conceit in the play is that the Government has passed a ‘Hush Law’ where the majority of people are limited to using only 140 words in a day. It’s not censorship because people can choose to say anything they like within their word limit, but it’s suggested that the law affects working class people hardest as they need words more.
The play’s two characters, lovers Oliver (Ian Nutt) and Bernadette (Kate O’Connor) follow the legal requirements, meeting each other after work announcing the number of words they have left for their own conversations. Some chats must be mimed because they are out of words. Soon the couple are practicing how to abbreviate sentences, developing codes. They work on guesswork skills by playing Trivial Pursuit. Bernadette, a highachieving divorce lawyer, is not limited in her word use when she is working in court, a benefit that the creative Oliver does not have. The play’s title comes from an outburst from Bernadette where she has so many more words at her disposal than Oliver, and chooses to waste them by repeating the word ‘lemons’. Director Cate Nunn maintains a rapid pace as there are many short scenes that jump back and forward in time. Oliver is dressed, symbolically, in a Rolling Stones T-shirt – the image of the open mouth mocking the Government’s restrictions. The two leads play their parts naturalistically, their relationship developing with undercurrents of jealousy and feelings of inadequacy. The lack of words actually helps them cover up the cracks in their partnership, infidelities left unexamined, the differences in their ambitions not a cause for arguments.
Oliver, smiling insincerely, has a constant refrain that he loves Bernadette. His lines lose their veracity every time he uses them, not least because he must declare his passion for her with a diminishing word count. It’s an intriguing play about power, well-performed and with draconian free speech laws in Russia, topical.