An Intervention

Performance Works to March 17, 2024
Tickets from $15 at www.mitchandmurrayproductions.com

Posted March 10, 2024

How often do we hear the phrase – or say it ourselves – “I’m here for you”? That’s what friends say, right? But what if friends find themselves on opposites sides of an issue? Take Israel and Palestine, for example;  can friendship survive a difference of opinion when it comes to genocide?

In Mike Bartlett’s play, An Intervention, friends named only A (her) and B (him) find themselves arguing Tony Blair’s intervention in a Middle East war. He’s for it; she’s not.

It gets heated. B walks out on her.

He’s stodgy, conservative, uptight; favourite drink is port. She’s on the wild side; drinks anything and sometimes everything in sight. But, as B says about their relationship (in a direct audience address), “She energizes me. I steady her.”

During their next meeting, B declares he has a girlfriend. A is disgruntled. She thought she was his girlfriend but no, B says, she is his “good friend”. Hannah is his “girlfriend”. From that point on their arguments are all about Hannah whom A eventually calls “a bride of Satan”, “a fucking harridan” and worse. He calls A an alcoholic to which she replies, “I’m not an alcoholic. I like it. I don’t use it.” He walks out again.

Time passes.

But when the proverbial shit hits the fan, are they really there for each other? The final scene had me on the edge of my seat. Scary, riveting and almost funny in a macabre sort of way.

Under Aaron Craven’s excellent direction for Mitch and Murray Productions, these are two winning performances. Tall and lanky Christiaan Westerveld is almost schoolboy-ish in the role: a little petulant, easily upset, not much good in the give and take of a good argument, ill-at-ease in his body. We can imagine that B has been bullied as a kid, has few friends, doesn’t have much of a life. Westerveld nails it.

Kate Craven, as A, is as different from B as you can imagine. Feisty, outrageous, passionate in her character’s opinions, physical. While Westerveld simply stands with his arms hanging or folded, Craven is constantly moving, gesturing wildly, striding around the room. Interesting but not somehow surprising, we do not think they have ever slept together. Friends. Best friends. Or so they say.

When you’ve got a good story going, as playwright Bartlett does in An Intervention, you don’t need an overstuffed set. David Roberts keeps it simple: two drapes frame what appears to be a window with a view of identical houses marching up a hillside. This window scene is now and again rotated by the performers to present a couple of different images. There’s a table. A few chairs. And all contained in a small space within the larger Performance Works performance area: a perfect black box.

On occasion, A and B speak directly to us and we get a more intimate understanding of their relationship. They change their clothes in full sight as the location changes: a pub, her apartment, a sports bar. Each time B walks out and then returns, we know time has passed.

Interestingly, Lyn Gardiner’s 2014 review of the play in The Guardian, saw the play as a sort of comedy. Gardiner refers to it as a “ playful two-hander – a mischievous, deceptive look at friendship in its many forms. It’s framed as an old-fashioned comedy double act”. Under Craven’s direction, there is nothing here about “an old-fashioned comedy”. It’s more like a scathingly honest look at friendship, its limitations, pitfalls, misunderstandings; eventually it asks whether friends really are or can be, “there for each other.”

Unfortunately, for me, I had a lot of difficulty with A’s working-class British accent and the speed at which it is delivered by Kate Craven who is so truly in character it almost hurts.  In the heat of an argument – and An Intervention is all about opposing views – I missed a significant amount of dialogue. Admittedly, it’s quite likely my own personal limitation.

Nevertheless, Mitch and Murray Productions never fails to provide though-provoking, timely, exciting theatre and An Intervention is no exception. The final scene is a killer.