There have been many fictional accounts of purgatory, but in The Waiting Room, a play written and directed by second year student Dylan Marsh, it is portrayed as a room full of people from different places and times, complete with old magazines, coffee, and scratchy-looking chairs. There were a number of possibilities as to how this play could go, and lots of questions to be asked: what were their stories? How did they die? Were they going to heaven or hell, and how? These and many others came thick and fast in the first act with little resolution, and the initial blurry dynamic between the characters left the first act a little muddled, but with an intriguing complexity which stopped the play from descending into a simple good vs bad. Back stories came later, with differing results. Reggie, a First World War veteran dripping with the misogyny and emotional distance of days gone by, was unsurprisingly badly received by the others in the room, and didn’t consist of much more than a focus of hatred for the group before his eventual departure. Another character in need of some development was Andreas – ‘the boss’, a Brooklyn hard-man who unfortunately reduced to a Pulp Fiction caricature, ‘motherfucker’ being his every other word. The second act was redemptive, and besides Reggie most of the characters that had seemed one-dimensional were explored in some depth, and relationships established which introduced a level of intrigue to the plot, and affection in the audience’s perception of the waiting room’s inhabitants.
The acting in general was inconsistent in the first act, but by the second it seemed that everyone had settled into their characters. However, it was the first act that featured the best performance: Josephine Mitchell as Judith, a Jilly Cooper-esque novelist, the first to leave the waiting room, middle-aged and yet the injection of life which the first act needed. Her wit was a means through the jumble of characterization, and the scene in which Judith gets drunk and makes everyone dance was a way for the audience to connect with the characters in a more light-hearted fashion, after so much time trying to figure them out.
Aspects of characterisation aside, the play was very well written, the dialogue was sharp and funny, with a large dose of cleverly un-crass toilet humour. A lot of the action was around eating and pooing – ‘because it feels good to eat, and it feels good to shit.’ True enough, and a good way to bring back to mind the characters’ innate humanity alongside all of the big philosophical questions. The growing and changing relationships between the characters had a similar effect, and captivated the audience right until the end. The Waiting Room overall was a great play to watch, entertaining and engaging on many levels, managing to circumnavigate many clichés associated with an afterlife narrative. It focused in the end not on good vs bad, but on the issues which really mattered; relationships in the here and now.
Chess Carnell
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