A Guide For The Homesick
Southwark Playhouse, 16th October - 24th November 2018
We last saw actor Douglas Booth at The Trafalgar Studios last year making an impressive stage debut in Stephen Karam’s fantastic Speech & Debate, a no doubt daunting prospect given the intimacy of the theatre space and the close proximity of the audience. It is a thought that once again strikes me as I take my seat no more than 30cm’s away from the headboard of a bed that is a predominant part of the set. Theatre doesn’t get much more in-your-face than this, a pillow from the bed having fallen and landed on my foot three quarters of the way through. (I decided to leave it there rather than find myself becoming a part of the production).
The bed was part of the audiences transportation to an anonymous hotel room in Amsterdam that two Americans in Ken Urban’s double hander stumble into, having been complete strangers just a few hours before when they met in the hotel bar, their joint nationality making them kindred spirits in a foreign land. But all is not as simple as it seems. It soon transpires that the hotel room is where Teddy (Clifford Samuel) is staying alone having become separated from his friend Ed, who has worryingly gone missing having been brought to Amsterdam for a stag do. Jeremy (Douglas Booth) meanwhile has missed his connecting flight whilst returning home from Uganda where he has been working as a nurse, and so now finds himself killing time with Teddy who he is seemingly unaware has more than just conversation on his mind.
As the drink flows and the banter subsides, the two strangers emotional guards are incrementally dropped as both start to feel increasingly compelled to unburden their minds and their consciences, haunted as they are by the guilt they carry from life changing decisions both are now feeling the fall out from. Whilst they might have been looking for the comfort of strangers to help plaster over the cracks it is clear, as the truth begins to reveal itself, that happy endings are going to be hard to find for either.
There is a lot crammed into the 80 minutes running time of this play, as through Teddy and Jeremy’s confessions the playwright shines a light on themes of sexuality, seduction, mental illness, homophobia, politics, love, guilt, masculinity, HIV, religion and persecution. Few are unfortunately given enough time to really feel satisfactorily developed, although director Jonathan O’Boyle does his best to get us to the heart of the matter for each one.
Both Teddy and Jeremy’s slowly relinquished confessions are told through flashback’s, both actors doubling up in the role of the ‘other’ character in the opposites story. These transitions seem more rapid as the play goes on, and both actors make a great job of switching their performance from one to the other. This comes after a less than convincing start to the play however as both Samuel and Booth’s early portrayals seem to be larger than either the script or the venue asks for. Whilst Teddy is clearly the more ebullient of the two main character’s, Samuel initially seems to be pitching his performance to the back of a gallery belonging to a theatre twice the size as the one we find ourselves in. Meanwhile Booth also seems a little uncertain how effete to make his character at the start, an inconsistency that reduces the impact of one of the many upcoming revelations. In both these cases less would have definitely been more in the opening moments of the play, and would have aided a more dynamic build as tensions are racked up to what is an undeniably intensely powerful conclusion. All that said, both actors are completely convincing by the time their characters are at their most desperate and once the play finds it’s rhythm A Guide For The Homesick becomes an emotionally gripping piece of theatre with a finale you ultimately cannot fail to be moved by.
Fun fact: For A Guide For The Homesick’s world premiere at The Boston Centre For The Arts last year, the part of Jeremy was played by Samuel H. Levine who is currently lighting up the London stage a short distance away at the Noel Coward Theatre, in his performance as Adam/Leo in The Inheritance. (See review)
★★★★
