Not Fantastical

With friend Chris to the Blue Elephant Theatre last night - a location that seems to have slipped in quietly among the housing estates of Camberwell like an overweight TARDIS when no-one was looking - to see Justen Bennett's The Fantastical Adventures of [Not] Being With You. I was drawn there primarily by the participation of Ryan Wichert, whom I first met when he tolerated my many fluffs in the one scene we had together in As You Like It in January, and who impressed me then and since as a good actor with a strong stage presence. I was also intrigued by the idea of a play that was about a relationship yet was gender-neutral and which just happened to be performed by two men.

The good news was that Ryan's performance was excellent, as was fellow player Max Wilson's under the able direction of Justen Bennett. The bad news was that the play, written by the same Justen Bennett, was less than wonderful and ten minutes into the eighty minute run I was already losing interest.

What Bennett offers us is much less a portrait of a relationship - either in its current form or as it has developed - than a series of episodes in which the two cast members cavort around on the stage. All these episodes, with perhaps the exception of engaging the audience in a simulated orchestra, are well-written, well-played and often funny - such as Wilson's rapid drawings of underwater creatures to Wichert's manic commentary, or the slapstick the pair occasionally indulge in - but they seem to have been inserted for their own sake and not as illustrations of how and why these two individuals came together.

For most of the play, in fact, the fun takes over, until the author suddenly remembers that he is supposed to be writing a play about a relationship and he throws in a few minutes illustrating that fact. But these moments are shallow and unconnected and while we get a vague sense of the attraction and even love between the two, there is no exploration of their personalities, what brought them together, what keeps them together and what might tear them apart. In short, we were presented not with the three-dimensional picture of a couple in love, but a two-dimensional picture of affable clowns - Morecambe and Wise, or Vladimir and Estragon without the pathos.

Wichert and Wilson will definitely go far. Bennett obviously has the skills of a writer, but this play only hovers over the surface of people's lives; it's time for him to look underneath.