Disruption - Park Theatre

[jr]

parktheatre.co.uk/whats-on/disruption

Saw the 2nd preview last evening. Allowing for that (I think it took 20-30 minutes longer than expected, they advertised 1h50m, we left at quarter to 10), I don't think it is a very good play. It is full of cliches (they are all rich, successful Newyorkers with rich people's problems I cannot relate to) and too many characters for the author to deal with, he just stays on the surface. The acting is very uneven; I really liked Debbie Korley and Rosanna Hyland was very good too. A couple of them were terrible: flat delivering of lines, lack of rhythm. I am not a native English speaker but I found the accents all over the place, but maybe me that was me. Or the characters are from different places and I didn't get that.

I think the director does what he can. There a few transitions with raincoats and umbrellas that I did not get, you could cut them and nothing would be affected. I won't spoil the ending but I thought it was too short and did not add anything.

If google was right ( I checked the photographs), the author was in the audience, I was a couple of seats away. He was laughing a lot (usually the only one doing it), quite loudly, at his own lines. I found that a bit weird, maybe he was trying to be encouraging.

I hope it gets better during the previews and wish them good luck. I would be interested in reading what other people think. 

[dlevi]

I saw this last night and pretty much agree with jr's comment above. While the play held my interest it was severely lacking in any sort of depth or valuable insight.The acting especially by Nathanial Curtis was of a low grade. They all memorized their lines but it seems received no direction beyond blocking. The design was flashy and expensive but this very much a two-star evening.

[Dave B]

I also saw it on Thursday night and thought it pretty dreadful. A mostly really poor cast, badly in need of someone to get them into shape. The AI screens looked cheap and rubbish yet used so often, they'd have fitted nicely into place in the original 60's Star Trek.

The place was packed full of Americans and everything was funny and laughing felt participatory. More than once, just with the layout of Park, I had visitors in stitches next to me but could see eyerolling in both sides of the stalls. The hugely warm reception was... well that is why you pack press night with friends and family I guess. The reviews are, I think, really odd. 4 stars from various papers but none of the reviews read as four stars, the blogs going with two and three stars and even then, they read as at best two stars.

I can't really recommend anything about this one

[oedipus]

Hmmm. I was attracted to this show because I really like sci-fi plays--such a potentially rich collision of form and content--and because it received a smattering of good(-ish) reviews. And I think the idea of the script is pretty neat: that eventually AI (which is hoovering up massive amounts of data) might be able to make better choices / predictions about our lives than *we* do, even if that means a little social engineering. (And the playwright nicely sets up the creepy ramifications of that scenario, among three couples and a Machiavellian 'friend'). But oof, the execution is terribly uneven: I generally liked the design (all cold code and stark lighting), but the acting was really, really all over the place, and the writing wasn't as sharp or incisive as I might have liked. Definitely would have made a better one-act: a lot of the energy dissipated at intermission.