E.V Crowe's play for teens at Unicorn Theatre welcomes us to a complex world of imagination and truth fuelled by a need to be in the loop.
The first exploding scene of E.V Crowe's Liar Liar at Unicorn Theatre drops you right into the dramatic world of fourteen year-old Grace and you get the feeling she likes it that way: full of drama and as haphazard as her bedroom (designer James Perkins). So it's a little sad but completely endearing that her most memorable, exciting moments happen only in her own head, fuelled by a combination of media, video games and her imagination and it's fun to listen to her reel off accounts of her life.
There's the night she fell in love with a boy, the night of the rave on the marshes and the night she got drawn into a murder case. Blanche McIntyre's production of Crowe's story contains intriguing overlap and enough gaps in Grace's tale to keep us guessing what part she may have played in a particularly dark episode of her neighbourhood's recent history.
As police investigations continue, Grace is half-helped by nosey neighbour Steve (utterly fantastic Carl Patrick), who seems to want to help but has an inflated sense of self importance. His part in her life is an example of the complexity she comes up against everyday, much like her relationship with her dad which just as confusing. You want to believe he's trying to help her but there's a heavy sense that he's out to save his own skin. (If we're happy to accept that teenagers have confused understandings of truth, then we'd better believe adults do too.)
Her sister on the other hand, seems sincere but damagingly naive. The perfectly cast Ritu Arya plays hyperactive Coco who insists it's like her “actual job” to keep everyone on Blackberry messenger up to date on rumours that involve Grace. “I need to know!” she cries, “And then I need to put it on Messenger!” and so we get an idea of the emotional and physical pitfalls of such free flowing, unfettered information and more importantly, the mindset around what it means to be in the loop and how disastrous it can seem to be out of it. Athough it's not really touched on in the play, Liar Liar does also make me wonder how much use the police make of Blackberry Messenger and the like as evidence.
Despite an interesting story and some great acting - not least from a controlled Danusia Samal as Grace - the sense of trepidation felt by the central character does not make its way into the audience. We're simply not as scared for her as we should be nor do we feel the impending sense of doom that she tells us about. This could be down to pacing as there's a highly energetic opening around a character who we find to be very contemplative and the two strands of her being never seem to intertwine very well. But they should since Crowe has written up a fantastically complex character with a multi-faceted life to navigate. 
Liar Liar runs at Unicorn Theatre until 6th March
Image by Manuel Harlan
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