'Performances You'll Write Home About'
Liz Vercoe reviews The Sugar Syndrome – at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond
John Hollingworth and Jessica Rhodes
This play from 2003 about a teenage girl playing with internet fire is well worth taking another look at, but it's the performances you'll write home about.
Lots of people hooked on TV's Succession or recalling the magnificence of her play Enron will be coming to The Sugar Syndrome just to see how the remarkable storyteller Lucy Prebble started out. This was her debut play, back in 2003, and she's been dusting more and more awards ever since, reflecting her consummate skill at weaving the science, business and political turmoils of our time into emotional relationships on screen and stage.
Jessica Rhodes and John Hollingworth
And it started for her here, when the internet was relatively new and people were learning to hide their true selves behind their computer screens. What happens, ponders Prebble's 17-year-old play, when unrooted people get to egg each other on in this unstructured space?
But while the play is good, very good for a debut by a then 22-year-old, it's another debut that audiences will go home talking about: Jessica Rhodes, straight out of Rada and playing Dani Carter, the 17-year-old sixth former at the heart of the play. If she follows Prebble's career trajectory, one day you'll want to brag you saw her "first".
Dani is a troubled teen, living with and driven to distraction by her overwrought mum Jan, played magnificently by Alexandra Gilbreath, who is too timid, or too pc, to encroach on her daughter's "private space". Left largely to her own devices, Dani has discovered an internet chat room where lonely souls hook up and share their sexual desires.
Alexandra Gilbreath and Jessica Rhodes
In this way she's met Lewis and the play opens when the pair decide to flesh out their fantasies in the real world. Unworldly and sexually frustrated Lewis is portrayed, with pin sharp accuracy, by Ali Barouti as a pleasant but insecure twenty-something who can't believe his luck. For Dani it is certainly not love at first sight. Anyway, the chat room has also thrown up the intriguing (to her) curiosity of Tim (John Hollingworth) who thinks Dani is an underage boy. Dani sets out to find out more about what makes him give in to "just a feeling". She has reasons of her own.
The set by Rebecca Brower of kinky shiny black plastic and thin neon lighting is great to start with, suggesting the anonymous chatroom environment, but serves less effectively when the play moves between Lewis, Tim and Dani's homes and the park.
Prebble deftly conjures a world where there is no safe haven for Dani – and clearly never has been – no place where childishly ill-judged experiments can be retreated from and put into perspective. It's recognisable as the world today behind gang culture and of grooming. As is the seeking to be noticed, to be special, to have a worth, even if it's being treated as worthless that puts you at the centre of things.
And this is where Jessica Rhodes digs deep into her already seemingly overflowing actor's toolbox. She is in turn funny, seductive, innocent, young, wise, lost, savvy, scared and lonely. Mostly she is just kind and your heart is in your mouth for her as every choice she seems to make is a choice to fail. And, throughout we see Tim only through her eyes which, when it comes, makes her ultimate choice all the more powerful. John Hollingworth strikes just the right note with Tim to keep you guessing to the end.
Liz Vercoe
Images: The Other Richard
February 3, 2020