Writer: Lucy Kirkwood
Director: Lucy Morrison
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
If you have booked tickets to see That Is Not Who I Am, new writer Dave Davidson’s thriller about identity theft, prepare to be surprised or perhaps, disappointed. No, it is not yet another cancellation due to Covid; the reason is that neither the play nor the playwright actually exists. They are no more than a smokescreen for the real play, Lucy Kirkwood’s Rapture, a work which we are told is deemed to be so explosive that its mere existence needed to be kept under wraps.
Kirkwood showed all the instincts of an investigative journalist when sifting through video evidence from the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre to find inspiration for her 2013 hit drama, Chimerica. Here, she uses similar techniques to probe events much closer to home in the United Kingdom in revealing the story of Noah and Celeste Quilter from their first meeting on a blind date in 2011 through to a conclusion in December 2021. Spoilers will be avoided in the review which follows.
Noah is an ex-serviceman, Celeste a nurse in the National Health Service. Their dinner date is awkward, but they find chemistry and boast afterwards that they left the restaurant without paying the bill; Kirkwood quotes evidence to suggest that this version of events could be untrue. So all is not what it seems, but, more concerning, the couple sense that their innocent conversation is being overheard. They go on to move in together, marry and have a baby daughter, building a home in which they have only each other to interact with and trust. All the time, their paranoia about being listened to and watched grows.
Played by Jake Davies and Siena Kelly, Noah and Celeste are simply “two of us”, living ordinary, unremarkable lives. As such, they are completely believable and it takes interjections by Kirkwood herself, played by Priyanga Burford, as narrator to remind us that something is dreadfully amiss. Burford’s anxious tone and urgent delivery ratchet up tension as we watch the couple transform from sceptics who question the establishment, climate change, the pandemic and so on, into neo revolutionaries with almost a million followers on their You Tube channel.
Working together, the writer and director Lucy Morrison make thrilling theatre. Designer Naomi Dawson’s ingenious revolving set frames the claustrophobic world of a couple glued together, with the narrator and stage hands roaming around outside it to suggest constant intrusions on their privacy. Their minds become taken over by conspiracy theories and every conspiracy theory is seen to be part of a bigger conspiracy theory
Ironically, Kirkwood’s play is itself planting a conspiracy theory and, cleverly, she casts doubt on the conclusions which she is reaching. She invites us to trust in the thoroughness of her research, make our own decisions, mull over the implications thereof and then shudder.
Performance date: 16 June 2022
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