Voila! Theatre Festival ~ ‘Sharing is Caring’

It’s nice to be invited to work by an emerging company in one of those of festivals that is teeming with new talent – it reminds me that we are all part of the same eco-system and experience common highs and lows even if they look and sound slightly different. So, when Jean, a cast member from ‘Sharing is Caring!’ pinged me an invitation to Voila! Theatre Festival at the Theatre Deli I couldn’t resist.

The Cockpit’s Voila! Festival  is also well pitched – it offers a window into emerging euro theatre at this time when left leaning audiences want to affirm connection to the continent, perhaps holding hope for a Labour endorsed remarriage of free movement in a single market.

Klervi Gavet’s play, Sharing is Caring is the result of a residency that has supported an interesting demographic of Europeans – young adults who have studied/lived in the UK and traverse their home countries with others. Its topic is also fundamentally interesting – the experience of squatters during a housing crisis in which all but those with middle or higher household incomes are priced out of owning or renting their own homes. So far, so good…

We are invited into sit-com flatshare land – there is a large sofa, a littered coffee table, and an impressive fluidity of coming and going between six young housemates of differing types – there is Marion the French strip-club dancer (played by Gavet), Irie, (played by Jean Lee Summers) a troubled student lawyer who is light-fingered, Hannah (Rachel Cummins) – who as the mother of the house holds the community together. Anecdotes about past nights out and one-night conquests gone comically wrong abound and spill into a prolonged nightclub dance scene.

Without reading the blurb for the piece, the first twenty minutes of the show is curious, leaving the audience with the constant question – so what?

We finally learn that timing is actually everything in this world – the group are served a notice of eviction with twenty-four hours to vacate. Suddenly the play clicks into sharp focus and there are moments of directorial joy when the characters’ fluid rapport is elevated by idiosyncratic expressions of panic. Police cars sound outside, and the image of a barricade is conjured…

For an hour or so we are flies on the walls of the house, witnessing each relationship dynamic unravel in a series of emotive and cathartic conversations – Hannah and her practical German boyfriend contend with the flaws in their relationship…all reflect on the betrayal of one housemate in sleeping with another’s ex-boyfriend, also a resident. These capsules of conflict seem trivial compared to the more urgent negotiations around whether to leave and negotiate with the authorities or stay and be removed. A particularly memorable and striking performance comes from Jim Duah, the graduate Engineer committed to the communal ideal of the house.

The threads of discussion around the rights of squatters in abandoned properties and acquired ones are genuinely interesting but do fall into the category of talking-head sofa discussion that stick out, sore-thumb like among the ‘Is there Nutella?’ babble.

In total, all the ingredients of an engaging and moving one-act play are stirred into the communal broth of Sharing is Caring, but its tensions aren’t in alignment. While we are treated to soapy, catharsis in each dynamic confrontation, we lose interest in the present drama and cease to ‘care.’

Although this debut piece is enthusiastically overwritten and under-edited, it is testament to the quality of performing talent and burning desire of young EU theatre makers to take on relevant subjects ~ sharing is indeed caring. More of this…

TF