MUSTARD (Traverse Theatre/Peacock Theatre/Fishamble: The New Play Company)**

 

By Cal

Link: https://www.traverse.co.uk/whats-on/event/mustard

Available until: Monday 14^th December

Content warning: Contains themes of mental health and self harm. 14+

Sometimes I watch a play that just doesn’t work for me. It’s just as likely to be a failing in me as a failing in the play. Mustard has won awards so I feel it ought to be good. But I wasn’t feeling it.

Writer and performer Eva O’Connor plays a woman in love. She’s met a guy, a cyclist, and she thinks he’s amazing. She doesn’t see him as much as she’d like because he goes away a lot, but he’s worth waiting for. He’s the one.

When things start going not exactly as she’d hoped, she doesn’t cope well, as is the case for so many of us in that situation. She finds coping methods which she thinks are helpful, but other people don’t see them as normal and they don’t understand.

There are positives in this play. Eva O’Connor has a powerful stage presence. There’s no doubt about her ability to communicate text. She’s brave and committed, ready to do whatever it takes to get her story across.

She is also a good writer. She gives the impression of having searched carefully for the right words and some of her lines are striking and original. She definitely has a voice and it’s a very individual one.

Director Hildegard Ryan gives Eva a lot to do onstage. A lot of props – and I mean this genuinely, I don’t know how she manages to pick up so many pots of mustard at once. That really is impressive. Eva copes with her props easily and dextrously.

But I did struggle a bit with what the play was trying to achieve. Eva was telling us a story, yes. But it did feel a bit like a play that was aiming for shock value. A lot of the things she says could be considered shocking. The same goes for a lot of the things she describes doing, or even actually does onstage in front of us.

However, it wasn’t really shocking because it wasn’t really new anymore. I hadn’t seen anything exactly like Mustard before, but I have seen and read similar stories which use similar shocking devices. This meant I wasn’t really shocked by it. Without the shock value, I needed to find something else to grasp onto; something that made this story into something new and remarkable and unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything (though that doesn’t necessarily mean there was nothing to find. Eva got her awards for a reason). All the ingredients are there, but the story didn’t quite cut the mustard.