MELANCHOLY (Southwark Elders Company/Southwark Playhouse)****

 

By Emma 

Link: https://soundcloud.com/southwarkplayhouse/melancholy-by-abraham-adeyemi 

Available until: Unknown

A lot of plays especially modern ones have a really big and clever idea which you’re supposed to figure out or some kind of really major issue which is really important. I think these plays are really enjoyable too and they’re a great way of getting people to think about the important things in the world. But sometimes you don’t want to use your brain in order to understand the story. Sometimes you just want to enjoy the play and let your brain kind of figure things out in the background.

There are some playwrights (mostly quite old) who write about people in a specific social situation like Oscar Wilde or Alan Ayckbourn. Abraham Adeyemi who writes this play reminds me of them. He has his own style but he has the same way of showing personalities and relationships. There’s a story that’s kind of on the surface which is lots of characters talking to each other and this is really great. There’s humour and tension and sometimes romance and you get to see how all the different characters relate to each other. But there are also things going on under the surface. If you don’t pick up on them it doesn’t really matter because you can still enjoy what happens on the surface. If you do pick up on them it makes you appreciate the play even more.

Melancholy is about a social event. It sounds like some sort of party and at least some of the guests are related. One of the guests hasn’t come. One of the guests maybe wishes they hadn’t either. They talk about ‘normal’ happy things at first. The things they feel they should be talking about. But there’s a lot going on underneath and it’s obviously going to come out.

I really enjoyed it. It’s a great idea and the characters are really interesting. I think it could have been a lot longer and explored the characters and the situations a lot more (and maybe the person who didn’t come could have come after all) but even as just a twelve minute play it works really well. Abraham Adeyemi’s writing is easy to follow and you care about the characters and the difficult situations they’re in. All the characters seem so real and so human.

I’m not sure who played which role but all the actors are all good. Keith Biley who was in They Also Serve is back and he is joined by Hilary Hodsman, Freddie Adamson and Jeanette Lineham. The director is Toby Clarke and he’s made the conversations at the start feel just as important as the ones at the end when people start saying what they really feel. It’s all part of the story.

The Southwark Elders Company are really good and the plays are really interesting and different.