The Band Back Together, Arcola Theatre review - three is a dangerous number

We meet Joe first at the keys, singing a pretty good song, but we can hear the pain in the voice – but is that the person or the performance? When Ellie walks in, he leaps up like a cat on a hot tin roof, nervous as a kitten, and we know – it was the person.

Barney Norris’s 2024 play comes to London and finds the right venue in the Arcola’s intimate studio space freighting just the right quantum of claustrophobia into a production that often suggests our eavesdropping on three real people who have hired the room to rehearse. You wonder if it would all just go on whether we were there or not, such is the naturalist ethos underpinning everything we see.

Much of that atmosphere is due to the writing that, especially in the first half, captures the way real people speak, a rather more rare occurrence than one might expect in theatre. Dialogue comes in fits and starts, conversations hit dead ends, people talk over each other accidently and excitedly. For once, having the writer take on directing duties pays off, as I’m not sure how a script could catch that on a page.

The actors buy in too. James Westphal (pictured above with Laura Evelyn and Royce Cronin) gives Joe a damaged humanity we’ve probably seen in thirtysomething friends of our own, a life going slowly, then quickly, off the rails with an almost physical desire to turn back the clock to happier, simpler times. It’s a lovely evocation of a specific individual in the first half, but, asked to play the role ‘in vino veritas’ as the secrets flood forth after the interval, the character felt unnecessarily overcooked, swigging cider from the two litre bottle. We knew enough about Joe to know he’d return to such teenage ways without having to be shown, the subtlety that marked much of the rest of the play rather lost.

Laura Evelyn’s Ellie (wearing FU Barry Manilow and Phil Collins tour T-shirts) is initially sunnier than Joe, reluctant to ‘go there’ when the stilted conversation turns the clock back 18 years to when the band last played together, Joe having re-assembled the trio for a charity gig in their home town, Salisbury. She isn’t averse to a smidgeon of passive aggression and some cutting asides delivered with a slightly duplicitous smile, and you wonder why she agreed to the reunion at all. But there are secrets inside her too and out they tumble.

Guitar hero, Ross, played with a swagger by Royce Cronin, is late (natch) and, as a professional touring musician, is more businesslike, more driven than the somewhat ambivalent Ellie and the desperate Joe. He also reveals a more complex personality than we might expect, a bridge-burner with, as we discover, his reasons.

The play is punctuated by songs developed by the cast and music supervisor, Tom Cook, which have a touch of the B52s and a touch of Dolores O'Riordan in them with a side order of The Cure. Not just serving as musical interludes, they show that the band were really good and, adding another layer to recriminations said and unsaid, might have made it had things turned out differently. 

In some ways the vibe is that of a French movie, possibly starring Juliette Binoche and definitely with the three members of the disintegrated musical (and more) ménage à trois much wealthier, much more middle class, more unapologetically introspective. As is the case in those films, once we clock the sexual dynamics past and present, the play can drift a little, themes about the impact of the Novichok poisonings and the lingering tail of Covid’s deleterious effects on mental health, only tangentially addressed.

Though the production benefits from its deliberately small scale and provincial setting, it does need some lift, some spark, a revelation that really detonates the network of relationships that are too fragile now to be put back together. It shows too much fidelity to its title, which needs a question mark at the end - but you knew that anyway. That said, if Oasis can do it, who knows?

• The Band Back Together at the Arcola Theatre Studio 2 until 28 September
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