“The only way is up” might have been the motto for the Orange Tree over the past year. Last spring, the future couldn’t have looked bleaker for the Richmond producing house when it lost its entire Arts Council grant overnight. Yet here we are, seven productions later, looking back at a season that has included an almost bullish proportion of new and rarely performed writing.
Buckets, by director-turned-playwright Adam Barnard, is a collection of 27 scenes, mostly monologues and duologues, some of them just a couple of lines, like theatrical haikus, others quite extensive, though the entire evening comes in at a brisk 75 minutes. The theme is our awareness of time running out, the pressure we feel to make the most of life, whether it be long or short (and does knowing in advance make a difference?). The title, while it might include a sense of “buckets of time”, more obviously refers to the bucket list - an enumeration of must-dos before the shutters come down. Unfortunately, this emphasis steers the mood towards the maudlin.
In the first scene, “Doctor” readies himself for the withdrawal of treatment from his dying child. In “Journalism”, an editor tries to turn a piece about a terminally ill teenager into a snappy headline grabber. “On the Phone” sees a girl mugged for her mobile just as she's filming her suicide note (Charlotte Josephine hitting the tragi-comic register spot on). In “The Mission”, a girl asks a stranger for a kiss, because she says she’s dying. But is it really just to avoid all those anxious early stages of love?
The more tangential to the theme, the crisper the writing becomes. In “Terms and Conditions”, a man finds himself having to sign up for his body as if it were a piece of electronic kit: “Battery life varies between models”, he is told. In the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it “Bungeeabseilskydive” the person about to jump from the plane stalls in the open hatch at the critical moment, as the rest of the ensemble make the sound of rushing air through their teeth. The play could have done with more opportunities like this for the actors to get physical. On the whole, there’s a lot more talk than action.
That said, director Rania Jumaily creates a terrific flow from the choppy text, drawing lively and sometimes touching performances from her cast of six, and transitioning smoothly in and out of close-harmony pop ballads (performed by a local singing group) which add to the variety of textures. Yet there is an anomaly in that, given its potentially hefty subject, the whole doesn’t add up to the sum of its parts. Buckets is clever, and often funny, but curiously weightless.
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