THIS DOES CONTAIN SPOILERS
I took my IB students (lovely people that they are) to the theatre last week. We’d agreed to watch Dave Davidson’s ‘That is Not Who I Am’ a ‘slippery new thriller’ about identity theft at the Royal Court Theatre. Not for any reason to do with the curriculum and entirely because theatre reaches parts other things cannot reach, plus, as a teacher, it is my MO to find ways to make people think. This was a celebratory visit after two difficult years.
We were ready for spiky, hard-hitting new drama. We got something much more than that.
Firstly, we were made very aware that the Royal Court knows we expect it to be edgy. The big warning that we weren’t seeing what we thought we were seeing because of legal issues and that the Royal Court doesn’t ‘break the law lightly’ (seasoned theatre goers fnarr into their hands; we see you’re messing with us) gave that away. There is the illicit thrill that this COULD be true though. And this typifies the whole experience.
We follow Noah and Celeste as they have an awkward but sweet first date, move in together, marry and have a child. We become attached to Celeste’s compassionate NHS nurse character, trying to keep some semblance of normality (wonderfully played by Siena Kelly) as Noah Quilter, an ex-soldier and even at the blind date, something of a conspiracy theorist, (Jake Davies is completely convincing) gets more and more enmeshed with idea he is being watched and lied to. Yes, I was one of undoubtedly many who Googled to double check that the Quilters were not real and I hadn’t missed the story. Kelly and Davies have fantastic chemistry, so it is slightly ironic that the most believable part of the story is the part we are sure is acted.
One of the many clever things about this play is although we see the metatheatre and we are told that Lucy Kirkwood is played by Priyana Burford, you still suspend disbelief and start to see it as a documentary. The use of the revolve to go to differing parts of the Quilters’ home becomes strangely claustrophobic, as though we too are part of the surveillance that Noah and Celeste fear. Rather than turn the set automatically, director Lucy Morrison and designer Naomi Dawson have a large number of stage managers and stagehands turning the bare frame and obviously giving the actors props. You can see through to the props table and some of the lighting rigs – it isn’t accidental but all very carefully placed. This conscious use of metatheatricality is not intrusive – my students were still convinced they had seen a documentary for the majority of the play – but strangely adds to the feeling that this is reality. The Kirkwood character is usually on the stage somewhere and watching. Not wanting to sound all conspiracy theorist here, but the creation of this alternative reality is a demonstration of how easy it is to fool the people most the time. It was only the shooting of the pregnant Lucy Kirkwood (not really Lucy Kirkwood) at the end that hits anything like a step too far for it to be reality.
Kirkwood is once again doing a superb job of getting us to ask questions. One of the underlying ideas seemed to be that one person’s paranoia rubs off on another, or that the line between sanity and insanity is very grey indeed. This raises questions about why there have been so many conspiracy theories recently, and perhaps this is fin de siècle at the end of an era? We know that change and fear of change tends to make undercurrent anxieties come out, and this certainly plays on the fears and anxieties of being such a watched society, where data is mined and some say, in a Churchillian way, ‘democracy is the worst form of Government’ (forgetting the second clause ‘except for all those other forms that have been tried…’).
I thought this was a brilliant play and thoroughly recommend it. Royal Court Theatre, you have done it again!
Playing until 16th July.
