‘Thrones’ star shines in bid for teen audience
I and You Hampstead Theatre
I’m usually uneasy with casting that involves “names” from Game of Thrones. If anything, it puts off “non-throners” (yup, that’s me), because we’ll wind up surrounded by fans bestowing rapt attention on a show that may well deserve nothing of the sort (witness that awful Faustus with Kit Harington).
For the record, then, the “coup” of casting Maisie Williams – known to millions (no, literally) as headstrong Arya Stark – is to me a bloodless one. She’s 21, making her stage debut in this two-hander by Lauren Gunderson (apparently America’s most-produced female playwright – who knew?) and, as far as many theatregoers are concerned, she’s an unknown commodity. Does she conquer here?
The answer is a resounding – if not to say stark – “yes”. In fact, the Somerset-raised actress is the single biggest reason to make a detour to Swiss Cottage this month.
In playing a stay-at-home 17-year-old American girl called Caroline, it might be argued that she’s hardly venturing outside her comfort zone. Although the scenario of self-confinement to a bedroom is explained (in a puzzlingly vague way) by a debilitating medical condition, it’s one with which most teens can identify; and Williams was even homeschooled for a while too.
What’s singularly praiseworthy is that Williams communicates a lot of subtle nuance on a big, exposing stage – achieving authenticity in a role that’s often rudimentary to the point of televisually flat.
There’s something slightly sophomoric – even soporific – about the set-up, in which Caroline’s cluttered, cosy but lonely cocoon is intruded upon by a fellow pupil – Zach Wyatt’s Anthony; African-american, geeky, insistently friendly. The latter, whose adolescent awkwardness is made worse by Caroline’s recoiling, sarcastic suspicion, asks her to help finish (and co-author) a project on the poet Walt Whitman. At least that’s his line; the intent is to bring her out of her social limbo, yet his Good Samaritan act is also spurred by basic curiosity.
Gunderson – married, in her 30s, and based in San Francisco – avers in an interview in the programme that she achieved the “language”, and juvenile insecurity, of her duo by majoring on question-driven exchanges, with “likes” and “justs” helping “the tempo”. While the pair sound realistic enough, what’s missing is phone-gazing mooching, the sort of banter that leaves grown-ups feeling excluded, and any sustained reference to the wider world.
Their conversation has a pedestrian air, even if there is much amusement at the expense of their fumbled boy-meets-girl overtures. The pay-off comes with a twist that justifies the astral ugliness of some of the décor, and propels things into a heightened state of emotion. For the most part, though, as they get better acquainted, more trusting, confiding unfashionable tastes ( jazz for him, Jerry Lee Lewis for her) and move into bashful flirtation mode, it’s the performances, directed by Ed Hall, that keep you hooked.
Williams is textbook perfect as the initially unsympathetic heroine, moving by comic degrees from arms-folded contempt to someone more dulcet, darting come-hither looks at her visitor, yet sitting on the anguish too of a life curtailed by sickness. She’s matched for entertaining, touching finesse by fellow debutant Wyatt, who catches the never-quite-rightness of a young man trying to impress.
Hampstead are going for the underserved teen market here. My teen daughter stayed at home, and I can’t say she missed much in terms of the play. Yet the warmth and poise of those youthful turns? Wow!
Until Nov 24. Tickets: 020 7722 9301; hampsteadtheatre.com
‘Williams is textbook perfect… she moves by comic degrees from arms-folded contempt to someone more dulcet, darting come-hither looks at her visitor’