Paperweight at the Camden People's Theatre

Paperweight at the Camden People's Theatre

09 October, 2008
by: Joe Harrod

After the show, I get into a debate about nakedness. Paperweight at the Camden People's Theatre is a completely authentic fringe theatre experience, complete with homages to Beckett and Pinter, slapstick comedy, nervous audience laughter, and the crowning glory, a character removing all his clothes. Back in the gilded days of youth, the reason for getting your cock out on stage was clear – it guaranteed to shift a few tickets. Perhaps it is unfair to ascribe the same motivation to the balls-out finale of this show, even though it is a successful survivor of the Edinburgh fringe where similar rules apply. No, this is a sophisticated piece: the naked man is being reborn.

Paperweight is a 70 minute office-based version of a fraught, miserable Beckett two hander. While the writers and actors successfully plumb the depths of despair and inevitability in the routine of filing and answering phones, the script is without the savage wit which is part of the deal in End Game or Waiting for Godot. While Beckett forces us to confront misery, he does so with sympathetically black and amusing characters. These two are just a bit zany.

This show deserves a lot of credit. It's genuinely bleak, has a proper degree of tension, and there are several laugh-out-loud moments. Any play that ends with a naked man bashing on the window while perplexed passers by examine his buttocks gets the fringe hallmark for derring do. The play has the audience sitting forward throughout; we want to know what will happen next.

However, our interest in the piece is created by the tension of actually being in the theatre. It's a purely visceral voyeurism rather than an emotional contact with the characters. Tom Frankland and Sebastien Lawson both act rather well, and excel at slapstick. I think the lack of empathy comes from a rather light script. The dialogue is deliberately sparse, and this works well to build tension, as for instance when we collectively wait, silent, for the kettle to boil. However when characters in Beckett do speak, even if they're making a joke, we learn something about them. It's not that we don't understand that one of Paperweight's protagonists is an anal jobsworth closet case and the other is putting his father into a home. It's simply that we don't care much for them.

Given the acting talent on display and the occasional flashes of brilliance (the imaginary incoming calls are a particular highlight) I don't think the ensemble who created Paperweight lack any ability. All the problems with the show result from adherence to an unwritten fringe code of practise: hence a slow pace, plenty of tears and a spot of nudity. The homages to Beckett are particularly irksome, with the sympathetic slacker character driven mad by voices from a dictaphone tape in a scene that exactly recalls Krapp's Last Tape – an unfortunate comparison to be drawing as the disembodied voices drivel on and we wonder when it will end and they'll get back to playing jokes on each other.

In the context of such threadbare characterisation and a certainty that somebody is going to end up naked, the eventual rebirth and reclamation of independence enjoyed by the rebel slacker is more a relief than a relevation. Time for a pint!

I sit gripped throughout the performance and heartily clap the actors for their bravery and comic timing at the end. However I'm not going to recommend that you see this show.


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Joe Harrod