Apparently the ‘theatre press’ whoever that actually is, won’t come out and review a show in a venue basement in Stoke Newington.
Some theatre critics – they obviously don’t know their history and that shows like Angels in America began life virtually in a broom cupboard with a 50-cent plastic shower curtain.
And we all know how that one turned out…
And the US influence is refreshingly present in Queer Brooklyn director Charles Quittner’s breathtaking adrenaline blast of a show, though has nothing in common with America’s obsession with a proscenium arch being the definition of theatre. His staging is literally electric.
It’s in that basement for reason, people. The world its central character Sam (Dan de la Motte) inhabits revolves around frantic urban nightlife spaces, thumping pop candy beats and light shows.
But if The Theatre Critics (“Who are you? We’ve never heard of this ‘Divine’…” had been bothered to lower themselves down those stairs, they might just have got a tour-de-force education in what immersive theatre really means.
White CIS-gender gay man Sam wants to do something about the toxic world we’ve made, especially its dangerous injustices to young Queer and trans people.
Instead he gets a job writing the Substack PR feed for monstrous X-Factor washout Riley Sabanda (but the gays love her, they love her…). And then it’s all urban meedja runaround, A-Gay parties with celebrities (and the gays just love celebrities, they love them…), drugs, sex, more drugs, more sex, knives in any back that’s turned for even a millisecond.
More sex, more drugs and existential, utterly narcissistic angst that’s very, very funny to behold, and becomes so real you quickly start to forget you’re watching a stage show.
Playwright David Levesley knows his subject – he was a journalist and former editor at British GQ. But it takes more than writer’s authenticity to make something like this fly, it takes biting talent.
The script is a genius–level thoughtstream of the identity crisis anyone who’s lived, worked and played in urban jungles like contemporary London will recognize in a drug-accelerated heartbeat. You don’t need to be Queer to get this.
You don’t even need to be young. But you have to be willing to laugh at yourself. This is exactly what might have been born if Mark Ravenhill, Irvine Welsh and Edina Monsoon had got together in a club toilet and said, “Let’s do a play. Oh, g’won, let’s…”
But then there’s the old, old dilemma, the brilliant script, can it ever find the perfect actor who can really bring it to life? They’re Love/Hate relationships, usually more Love than Hate, unless you’re the late Carrie Fisher.
Both need the other to breathe -and really need each other. But the symbiotically perfect actor for that brilliant script did come right along, and his name is Dan de la Motte.
Playing every character, making that aspect a unique joy to watch in a way that so many one-man shows never really reach, it’s an explosive, savagely funny, magnetically attractive performance from an actor who’s clearly realising the height of his powers to hold an audience right in the palm of his hand for the entire show and take them just wherever he wants to.
You can’t take your eyes off him. You won’t want to. And at the curtain, oh, did they love him! When Sam’s pain comes, in amongst the viciously funny takedowns of the worst of what we’ve all become, de la Motte has the perfect beat to deliver a pathos and powerful meaning that takes you completely by surprise.
It ought to be a career making performance – it’s that good.
So it can’t stay in that basement, though probably will lose a little bit of something very precious and unusual when it transfers – this has to go on to another venue.
However, you can still get it in its purest nascent state right there in the bowels of The Divine until July 2. Go for the last Sunday or Monday shows and you might just get to see Riley Sabanda appearing…No promises, mind.
For tickets, follow this link https://thedivine.co.uk/event/toomuchpl24/
2Shades Magazine 