Monday’s Open Drama Night saw Mungo Tatton-Brown’s new play Writers’ Circle performed to a packed Drama Barn, winning a wildly positive reception; and not just because of the writer-director’s familiarity with most of the audience. Funny, original and brutally self-conscious, Writers’ Circle, the promised ‘exorcism of the written world’, certainly delivers on the entertainment front.
If this zany play can be said to have a centre, then it is the Drama Barn itself; more specifically, Cat, a student writer set with the seemingly impossible task of marrying the assorted play-ideas of five wildly different writers into one coherent work, just in time for – you guessed it – an ODN at the Barn. The play begins, unsurprisingly, in said Writers’ Circle: five aspiring playwrights take turns to present their budding ideas to Cat (Ursula Wild) who remains at this point an anchor to drama that is already straining at its lead. The scene feels almost like an AA meeting as each hopeful takes the spotlight pitching their own (terrible) play in turn; with energetic performances from all sides preventing the sequence from becoming repetitive. Tom Kelsey and Blaine Kenneally get the laughs going with a read-through of comically self-important Jack’s script, with an energy sustained by Cameron’s (Charles Deane) wonderfully over-dramatized storytelling, Tammy’s (Zoe Biles) emotional account of a Twilight-turned-lesbian fiasco, Gary’s (Kenneally) refreshing logic and Christina’s (Louise Jones) brilliant smugness.
But Writers’ Circle is a play about more than York DramaSoc: as Cat struggles to constrain a menagerie of ideas to one play, the different stories take on a life of their own and begin to inhabit hers (and her sidekick, Val, made lovable by Lewis Dunn). The laughs keep coming throughout an increasingly farcical (and confusing) sequence of encounters. Though there are points where the play seems to relinquish control of itself a little too far, perhaps diminishing its dramatic energy, it quickly regains momentum and stumbles to a conclusive ending, just when the audience was losing all sense of reality.
As if Tatton-Brown couldn’t quite relinquish the spotlight he habitually inhabits at the Barn, his presence behind it contributes to an assumed familiarity with the audience which is perhaps slightly over-stated; the performance can come close to falling into an inside-joke of which the audience is not a part (especially at moments when the actors fail to keep a straight face). Still, some of the best moments in this play are those when it looks on itself– for example, the writer’s inclusion of himself extends beyond the obvious Cat-Mungo parallel when the latter is reincarnated as a successful screenwriter and playwright’s guru, constantly invoked by Val (we are awaiting the production of The Brain That Eats Itself with bated breath…). In writing ‘a play about everything’, Tatton-Brown has succeeded in constructing a play about itself.
Writers’ Circle is an intriguing ‘testing of the boundaries’ of what writing, or of what theatre, can do – and one which certainly doesn’t forget to entertain.