BLUE WHALE (Greenwich Theatre)****

 

By Cal

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSXXUSMaSDg&feature=youtu.be

Available until: Unknown

Four young people sign up for an online challenge. You know the kind. A new challenge every day, or a certain number a day. A way of getting through lockdown. A lot of us will have seen these; many will have participated. A lot of us will have given up halfway. Or even before starting. Others will push on to the end, even if we’re not that into the challenges anymore.

Blue Whale illustrates the dangers of this. The challenges start off very simple. The kinds of challenges you’d expect to see. But they become more and more serious. Completing the challenges involves damaging their health. Compromising their ethics. Affecting the people around them. The characters taking the challenge begin to fall by the wayside, having reached the limits of what they’re prepared to do. They would rather fail than go beyond a certain point.

But who has failed here, really? The people who don’t complete the challenges? Or the people who are prepared to do whatever is asked of them?

Although the play relates to the challenges which have been particularly common during lockdown, it could be applied to a number of things in life. We’ve all continued with projects we’ve started to have doubts about; continued friendships and relationships which have gone toxic; gone along with plans we’re secretly (or not so secretly) opposed to. This is usually seen as a good thing. Tenacity. Determination. Not allowing the negatives to prevent us from reaching our goals. But sometimes the things we’re asked to do, and the things we end up agreeing to - whether it’s out of kindness, a sense of duty, or a genuine belief that we’re doing a good thing - don’t turn out to be a good idea. The play is about completing lockdown challenges, but perhaps it’s not just those of us who are likely to get involved in challenges who are in danger.

Hugh Allison’s play is deceptively simple. The four young people appear on Zoom, reading out the challenges and showing how they feel about it in their facial expressions, tones of voice and brief comments they make after announcing the challenge. On the surface, this is all that happens. Akshay Khanna, Cassandra Hercules, Marz Zayat and Serin Ibrahim do a really good job of showing their characters’ personalities and the different attitudes people have to this sort of task. We see bright enthusiasm, amusement, wariness, the world-weariness of those who think they’ve done it all before. We see the characters wavering and wonder who will crack first. And second. And where their limits will be. Some decisions are a point of no return which can’t be taken back.

Director James Haddrell keeps the focus on the characters. We sometimes see them just beginning the task, but the only results we see are the changes in the individuals as they get more and more sucked in. This works really well because so much is left to the imagination – and it’s so easy to imagine the worst.

I’m not really someone who gets involves in challenges like that. For one thing, I have too many online plays to watch! But even so, I was captivated by this play. Eager to hear what the next challenge was. Watching the numbers of the challenges go up and up. I think I would have given up the challenges earlier than any of the people in this play, but I didn’t want to give up the play. Like the characters, I had the curiosity to see what’s next in the sequence. The desire to keep moving one step closer to the goal is in most of us. Blue Whale shows how dangerous that can be.