Remembrance Monday, Seven Dials Playhouse Review
Nick Hayes and Matthew Stathers in Remembrance Monday. Photo by Danny KaanWritten by Charlotte for Theatre & Tonic
Disclaimer: Gifted tickets in exchange for an honest review.
Michael Batten’s new two-hander Remembrance Monday looks almost immediately like a queering of Nick Payne’s landmark two-hander Constellations. Unfortunately, as much potential as such a piece undoubtedly has, Remembrance Monday fails to deliver the subtlety and focus necessary to pull off its conceit.
The play follows husbands Julius and Connor through a selection of scenes in their relationship–from their first date to seemingly insignificant moments in their married life. Julius, a retired dancer, is the play’s lens. Everything that happens in the small, sterile bathroom that makes up the play’s world is seen through his eyes, though it is apparent from the start that we cannot trust what we see any more than Julius can. The scenes are constantly fragmented by the intrusion of a visceral, ringing soundscape and copious amounts of strobe light, returning again and again to the same moment in time, the same Monday evening in the bathroom.
It is not that Batten’s framework is uninteresting, but rather that the reveal it relies so heavily on is too predictable. From about five minutes in, anyone paying attention has likely figured out where this nightmare is heading. Even in the scenes that lie between the repeated sequences of Julius’s mental fracture, Batten tries to take on more issues than one 80-minute play can feasibly tackle. Julius and Connor confront everything from body image to sexual infidelity to internalisations of homophobic abuse. And while all these are salient themes which often do coexist, Batten’s attempt to fit them all into the handful of moments Julius and Connor share in Remembrance Monday makes the characters feel more like case studies in a heavy-handed lecture on gay male experience than real people. If the rather obvious march towards the play’s central idea does not make you feel that Batten does not trust his audience’s intelligence, the exceedingly on-the-nose lamentations on the trials and tribulations of gay experience certainly will.
The production is not entirely without merits. The simple but effective scenic design by Andrew Exeter skillfully treads the line between real and imagined space, with its reflective, high-contrast surfaces supporting Julius’s interactions with his own mind particularly well. Nick Hayes and Matthew Stathers likewise deliver impressively embodied performances. Their chemistry is brilliantly developed as they play off each other with ease and craft each stepping stone of Julius and Connor’s relationship clearly and distinctly. Despite the often contrived dialogue, Hayes and Stathers bring sincerity and humour to the characters that is sorely needed.
In the end, I was disappointed to have spent so much of this relatively short piece thoroughly unengaged. Underneath its faults of execution is a concept with fantastic potential. With the right structural interventions and a bit more focus, Remembrance Monday could be a deeply impactful piece. As it is now, however, its muddled construction robs it of any effective emotional pay-off.
At Seven Dials Playhouse until 1 June.
☆ ☆ ☆
