The Door

Mix geometric design with ridiculous non-floating chairs, quantum entanglement and insomnia, and what do you get – thick foggy soup!

Billed as a dark, psychological drama aiming to take an audience on an unnerving and surreal journey through sleep deprivation, and further suggest wicked black humor.

Well, what it says on the tin definitely is not in it! This hotchpotch play and production of ideas and dreams is still just that. The Door is a pick-up and transfer from this year’s Brighton Fringe Festival and, to my mind, should have gone back into development post-fringe to iron out and tighten up the messy and fathomless story. Abstract is one thing, but incoherence is another.

There have been scores of dream-plays, nightmare-plays and deep psychological dramas set at the very edge of consciousness over time; but they have all been aware of the story they want to tell, the stakes therein and the ultimate outcome (or not) of its protagonists. Unfortunately there is just nothing to care about here. At all. There is no drama. I achingly longed for someone to be desperate enough to want or need something. In the end, all we received, as a well-behaved and tolerant audience, where plodding actors stumbling over lines, cutting each other off and not really knowing why they were there in the first place. Classic festival / student fare!

This is not the stuff dreams are made of.

Orlando Weston