★★★★★
Five Stars
It was a celebrated play at the 2011 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. One year later the Hollywood Fringe Festival awarded it with The Best International Show award. These haven’t been a bad few years for Richard Parker – a dark, ponderous and hilarious drama about fate and coincidence by Welsh playwright Owen Thomas, who is coming this week to watch his play being performed at the BT.
So the pressure is on. Or it would be, if the opening night hadn’t promised a show that is only going to improve across the week. Poor Player Productions have put together a brilliant piece, which works excellently in the intimacy of the BT, where minimal set and props enable the talent of the leads to come to the fore.
Richard Parker is about the meeting aboard a ship of two identically named men—played by Jake Boswall and Ieuan Perkins—who, despite all they have in common, are in the deepest and most important ways starkly different. One Richard Parker is temperate and modest, the other lives his life according to the dictates of coincidence. The reason for their meeting is known only to one of them but it is soon made clear that the two are irrevocably linked, and that one may have to crush the other in order to survive.
Covering shipwrecks, cannibalism, wasted lives, individualism, selfishness, and destiny, the play is as disconcerting as it is amusing. Do the men come together through choice or coincidence? Is the disturbing denouement following the tantalising twist of the ending down to decision or was it fated? Thomas gives no easy answers; and the idea that “someone, somewhere, is pulling the strings,” is rather less comforting than it might sound.
Do we have an ultimate purpose, determined by the precedent of history? Is there any escape from that which seems to be ordained for each of us? Just how important are our names and our circumstances? And, perhaps most disquieting of all, if all this can be dismissed as superstition and we do have no purpose—what then?
It is a superb play, superbly performed. Boswall and Perkins are each in utter command of their roles, demanding the attention of the audience in equal measure—no easy feat for a two-person play so dependent on dialogue. The worldviews of the protagonists are comically and cleverly contrasted through a quick, quirky and rapacious script that relies for its effect on exquisitely-timed delivery. Boswall and Perkins are more than up to the challenge.
Director James Watt has pulled it off. Let us hope that next he turns his hand to Thomas’s sequel, Robert Golding. Meanwhile, one might wonder whether it is a coincidence that Richard Parker was also the name of the tiger in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi—another tale about shipwrecks and cannibalism. Did Martel know the eerie history of that name? Something to ask Owen Thomas himself at the Q&A on Friday evening.
So be a nosy Parker and discover Richard and Richard. Richard Parker is on at The BT Studio until this Saturday.
