Review: HOW TO FIGHT LONELINESS, Park Theatre

All great plays have a moral dilemma buried at the centre. Loyalty, truth, justice, et cetera. The greatest playwrights narrow down these big juicy themes and shape them into a story, making the personal universal and challenging the audience by turning their views against them – it’s a difficult balance to establish.

The core of How To Fight Loneliness has so much potential. Neil LaBute builds this project around a collection of major arguments, hardly making his characters acknowledge the empirical decisions they face directly. People talk about nothing, saying everything, for over two hours. Assisted suicide, spirituality, lawfulness are the lining of How To Fight Loneliness. Unfortunately, the final product is a redundant show, meaty in its subject but largely exasperating and uninspiring.

We meet Brad and Jodie as they’re waiting for someone in their home. He anxiously fusses while she’s visibly hurting. When Tate appears, he’s the opposite of the polished, well-spoken couple who’s exchanged niceties until then. They struggle to address why he’s there, but we understand they’re asking him to put Jodie out of her misery. They talk around it, and then do it some more, and some more, until the interval. LaBute keeps justifying her choice to die over and over, refusing to properly break the subject open and explore its ramifications, which is remarkably frustrating. He leaves it as such: Jodie’s in pain and she deserves to choose to end it; her husband gently opposes to no avail. A fair enough reasoning, not an exceptional piece of theatre. 

On paper, How To Fight Loneliness is the perfect candidate to offer a philosophical take on human existence. Directed by Lisa Spirling, it tries really hard to do this, achieving some of it, but falling short in a number of areas. LaBute writes a reactive dialogue, with each side beckoning and interrupting the other in order to create a flowing vernacular that, however, sometimes feels too forcefully scripted. The characters run in circles, exasperating the over-explanations of previously stated assertions.

Jodie continuously reiterates her decision: the cancer is tearing her apart and she can’t cope anymore after her latest recurrence. As Tate puts it, “Cancer sucks”, we all know it and agree. That’s where the conversation stays for the length of the running time. It would have been interesting to hear the other face of the debate, Brad’s. LaBute obviously wants to uphold a rightful pro-choice stance, but, in shutting down Jodie’s husband as the antagonist, he removes the individual stakes, the guilt, and all the rest of the scope of complex emotions from the picture.

There are so many thought-provoking, compelling threads in the story. You can grab them and pluck them out of thin air, but the more you do, the more the fabric of the play frays and holes appear in it. The script was clearly written with layered gravitas, populated by ideas that are strong in spirit but frail in execution, but it ultimately feels like stepping in glue. Lisa Spirling’s direction has a feather-light touch: she keeps the action as natural as possible, but organises her actors with intent. They draw near and pull apart symbolically, but the text doesn’t follow. Where the dialogues lack, the company shines.

Justina Kehinde delivers an astonishing performance, swinging between walking on eggshells and fully embracing her mission. The contradictions and fears that epitomise Jodie’s judgement are all there in her delivery, it’s a pity that these aren’t echoed. Her resolution is opposed by Archie Backhouse’s Brad, who’s feebly waspish and mostly speaks in half sentences and interruptions. He finally gets his moment in a tragicomic segment shared with Morgan Watkins towards the end, but Brad is very much optional when it comes to upholding any analytical commentary.

Watkins, a caustic and blunt presence on stage, is a flawless agent of catharsis, but Tate’s figure isn’t exploited to its full capacity. A straight shooter and a picky eater, his character takes over as a complicated man who might not be eloquent nor educated, but who, unlike Brad, understands. The potential for depth is there, but it’s all kept too easy and superficial. Everything unfolds against Mona Camille’s set, a desolate landscape that materialises death. Sandy and dusty, homeware and naked shrubs coexist. It’s a Beckettian visual, striking in its symbolic impact.

Spirling’s vision elevates the material, but doesn’t pull off the production. The writing doesn’t ask any questions, opting to drag around a few solid opinions without unpacking any of them. We side with Jodie, but to what extent are Brad’s feelings valid? LaBute makes it clear that she has attempted suicide before, but her psyche has never let her go through with it, yet the effect that Brad’s final acquiescence has on her is barely consequential. And what about Tate? Does his stake go beyond his self-righteousness? There’s a variety of opportunities to examine self-determination and assisted dying here, but the play, with its lack of true rational conflict, isn’t there yet.