If you’re thinking of putting on a West End show, here’s what you need. Half a million quid. That should cover it. Unless it’s a musical, in which case you’ll need five or ten times as much, depending on how munificent/crazy you happen to be. Investors tend to be fretful, superstitious types who rarely make rational decisions about the start date of their theatrical ventures. No producer is willing to send 500 grand’s worth of dramatic wonderment into the skies if his rivals aren’t launching similar attractions in the same week. So the West End calendar is either overcrowded or utterly barren. Every year there are two dead zones. One is the end-of-Edinburgh lull, from which we’re just emerging. The other is the Nurofen-and-turkey-wing sabbatical between Boxing Day and 2 January.
Yet these launch-less weeks represent a tremendous opportunity. The daily papers are still being churned out. Radio stations are still cramming the airwaves with high-minded twaddle. Kirsty and Martha are still casting around for something to witter about on The Review Show. And critics like me remain hunched at our desks, picking our scabs and whetting our barbs, and secretly praying for a Seriously Lousy Show to appear so that we can give it a sweet and cathartic monstering.
Last week, as I sauntered through the West End in search of my bread and butter, I found myself among the rat runs and crack alleys just north of Shaftesbury Avenue. The title of Blink at the Soho Theatre caught my eye. And in I went. Blink has beaten the rest of the Fringe and taken gold in the annual sprint from Edinburgh to London. It bills itself as ‘a true story, and a love story’.
The show begins with a pair of geeky youngsters, Jonah and Sophie, sitting at identical desks, dolled up in corporate daywear. They talk at us in detached monotones and relate quirky details from their biographies. Jonah is a refugee from a Jesus-cult based in Yorkshire. When he finds a small fortune buried in a field, he migrates to London and takes a flat in Leytonstone. Sophie, abandoned by her mum, has been raised by her chain-smoking dad, who contracted cancer and puffed his last soon afterwards. Using his legacy, she buys a flat and lets it out through an agent. Her first tenant is Jonah. So they’re close but they never meet.
In whimsical, Nicholson Baker-ish prose, they give us further details of their solitude. Sophie develops an online shopping addiction. ‘When I open the packets, the stuff I’ve bought tends to seem quite random. Like a hundred vintage marbles. Or a machine for shaving the fuzz off jumpers.’ Jonah recalls a chance encounter with a girl. ‘She has curly red hair and smells like a tomato plant with joined-up freckles on the skin above her tits.’
Sophie, still grieving for her cremated dad, decides she needs a stalker in her life. She sends Jonah a screen gizmo to which she transmits live broadcasts of herself eating apples and listening to music. Jonah, by chance a gifted voyeur, settles down to watch her pottering around her flat. When she goes out, he monitors her movements from behind bushes and wheelie-bins. And she gets cheap thrills by leading him around London like a stray mongrel. And so their needy, warped and frictionless liaison begins.
Clearly this is a neurosis rather than a fling, a borderline perversion, a warped emotional response to severe psychological damage. But the writer, Phil Porter, insists on treating it as a warm and treacly love affair pursued by a couple of off-beat urban hipsters. Then comes a surprise. A car smash. Sophie is hit by a van full of thesps speeding to a primary school to present an educational drama about road safety. (The tragedy of this excellent joke is that, like Sophie, it’s an only child.) Our broken-boned heroine languishes in hospital, unconscious, while her loyal stalker tries to wake her up by sticking pins in her fingers.
At this point, Porter, who shares his characters’ fascination with abstruse detail, gives us a lesson in the management of coma victims. Finally, Sophie is restored to consciousness. The lovers kiss. And, ten seconds later, they decide to move in together. But their happiness is marred by the fact that they’re both deranged and petty-minded nerds who can’t relate to other human beings.
Blink is a very strange variation on the romcom genre. I might be tempted to call it charming but I can’t avoid the unhappy truth that it’s a contrived, frivolous and dissatisfying production with very clumsy lighting. Mind you, it does contain one invaluable snippet. If you need to know how to make love, in safety and comfort, to a woman recovering from a fractured pelvis, this is a must-see.
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