Review: CLIVE, Arcola Theatre

Didn’t we all go a little insane during the pandemic? Start obsessively baking sourdough and cleaning the house? Become a bit too reliant on Alexa? Get apoplectic with rage at colleagues we’d only ever met over Zoom?

For Thomas, the protagonist of this new one-man show from Cuckoo writer Michael Wynne, the ‘new normal’ has gone one step further – he’s not left his flat in two years, and he’s in a committed relationship with his houseplant, a cactus named Clive. In this claustrophobic environment (the set is an alarmingly sterile white box), every slight disturbance takes on an air of the sinister: an unexpected text chime, a package delivery intended for a neighbour, a conspicuous absence of tasks to do at work.

A one-man show can be hard to pull off, but Clive justifies its format. As Thomas (Paul Keating) manically confesses his every thought – Wynne’s script is so unrelenting that Keating has a few memory lapses on press night – the audience feels like intruders on the collapse of his mental health, and at the same time his only friends. In his breaks from his WFH job as an IT professional, where he feels increasingly isolated from colleagues he has never met, Thomas peers out into the stands at his neighbours and imagines details from their lives. The fourth wall has never felt so solid.

Despite (or perhaps because of) Clive being so adept at capturing the unnerving yet increasingly comforting feeling of being trapped within four walls, it loses its edge when it veers too far outside those walls. Observations about Thomas’ queerness and experience being bullied at school, as well as a ‘what if’ failed romance, come a little too late into proceedings to feel like anything other than clumsy afterthoughts.

There’s also the issue of why exactly Thomas’ workplace has become so odd – it transpires that an ambitious manager has been ousting longtime colleagues in favour of new recruits, for reasons which are never fully explained. Workplace paranoia and sinister corporate lingo (‘Head of People’ and the like) are familiar enough phenomena, especially in the era of working from home, so this aspect of the story could have made an impact without an elaborate conspiracy theory backing it up.

Perhaps, fittingly, Clive is at its best when it focuses in on Clive the cactus, and all he represents. ‘Played’ by a human-size plastic succulent, Clive’s anthropomorphism is totally believable; when Thomas grinds on Clive to Charli XCX’s ‘Von Dutch’, or panics over him developing mysterious black spots, we suddenly feel emotionally invested in an object that remains untouched, unmoved. Clive is not just a pandemic project gone wrong, but a personification of all that could and should have been.

It’s a powerful central metaphor, and through it Wynne makes Thomas’ despair and loneliness into something more complex than a mere symptom of his post-pandemic insular existence. There are no firm tabloid-headline conclusions to be found here about how technology’s ruining our lives, or how younger generations don’t know how to speak to people, and the play is all the better, and more timeless, for it.

Clive plays at the Arcola Theatre until 23 August