Continuity: A Comedy On Set, On Edge And Nearly Out Of Time
Image: Continuity, playing at New Theatre. Source: Supplied.
Fake snow, real dread, and a planet, I mean film, quietly losing the plot, Continuity promises what seems like a behind-the-scenes comedy and delivers something stranger and thornier than that.
A film set in the New Mexico desert, brought on by tax rebates of course, sweltering inside a big-budget Hollywood disaster film that’s eating itself alive.
A prima donna actress, a Sundance-winning director chasing her blockbuster shot, the writer hovering on set, and an eco-terrorist hero with a bomb and a plan to save civilisation have kept them here.
Sahn Millington‘s production of Bess Wohl’s 2019 play moves fast, looks great, and mostly holds together.
David Marshall-Martin’s set is the first thing you notice and the last thing you forget: a film-within-a-play staging with real production design grunt to it.
Julian Dunne’s lighting does the heavy atmospheric lifting, and together they give the show a visual coherence that the script occasionally struggles to match.
The performances are uneven but the peaks are high. Michelle Robin Anderson as director Maria and Nick Curnow as David, the writer, and perhaps more, she wishes would stay off set, are the beating heart of the show.
Their chemistry crackles, the timing is sharp, the barbs land, and whenever they share the stage the play knows exactly what it is.
Susan Jordan’s Laurie, the Debbie Downer cum science advisor, plays deadpan so committed it tips into something genuinely unsettling, funny and sobering at once. Jessica Joseph-McDermott brings real depth to Nicole, the diva who could easily have been a sketch.
Julie Quinn as the overeager PA and Noah Rayner as the disgruntled AD thread multiple gags through the whole production with welcome consistency.
The rest of the cast fill their roles without quite igniting them, and that middling quality extends to the comedy itself.
Continuity is sold as a farce but the laughs arrive unevenly and thin out as the play grows more earnest amid the satire. You end up more invested in the film-within-the-play than in the climate catastrophe lurking underneath it, which might be the point, except the final monologue arrives to make sure you didn’t miss the message. Unfortunately, it lands more like a lecture at a party with the room, onstage and off, losing energy at exactly the wrong moment.
There is a sharp, funny, unsettling show living somewhere inside Continuity, and this production finds much of it. The problem is Wohl’s script wants to do too many things and in its execution, not all of them cohere, all while the play has a habit of preaching to an audience that already showed up converted.
Continuity is running till 20 June at New Theatre.
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