A performance that captures a prevalent sentiment of millennials today who feel left out and left behind
The show seems to have no unifying plot, but instead, we are treated to snapshots of city life from characters with different careers and ambitions. Luke is a banker who feels increasingly trapped by a world of numbers and equations, to the point that he struggles to communicate with the attractive receptionist he likes; Emelie finds life in London to be very different from France both in terms of work and the dating culture (ie Tinder); while Bryony seems responsible only for buying coffee for her boss in the city. What brings them together, though, is a sense of disillusionment and fear that their current lives would amount to little or nothing.
Throughout, we are treated to a mixture of physical theatre, musical, fairy tale and drama. And between each segment, the busker (Ash Goosey) strums his guitar interval with lyrical recitations about the daily disappointments of our generation. For a show that riffs endlessly upon the tired trope of youthful burdens, the thematic over-insistence is only counterbalanced by the performance of the various theatre genres in the duration of the show. At times, even the busker’s musical monologues can seem rather lengthy and slow, despite the fact that he embodies the show’s mantra that “In little ways we change the city’s beat, and every stranger that we meet”. Otherwise, the physical choreography is idiosyncratic and excellent from the outset, with audience engagement providing refreshing rapport.
There is much to admire from this group of young actors. It is a performance that captures a prevalent sentiment of millennials today who feel left out and left behind. Even so, as the play aspires to bring together the many different voices of this society, not all the threads connect, and they do not build up to anything substantial. But everything is a working title after all.
