Gemma swims in the same sea of pettiness that often engulfs our lives. The bumbling, self destructive antics of parasitic friends. You know the kind. The girlfriend who gets drunk every time you go out, for example. You end up being an unpaid disability assistant, putting her in the taxi, holding her up as she stumbles over heels, consoling her as she bawls on the pavement at 2 AM. Time to get rid of these people. Gemma, will show you how, she has a plan.Anthony Minghella's 1988 radio play 'Cigarettes & Chocolate', adapted to the stage by Gemma wright, is a meditation on the irregular boundaries of our personal lives. Gemma (Clare Davis) decides to give up speaking for Lent. Her boyfriend Rob (Rupbert Warries) is sleeping with her best friend Lorna (Lauren Hyatt) and Rob's best friend Alistair (Harvey Dolphin) is in love with Gemma. Her other friends besiege her with their own self-made problems. She might as well not be there at all. She mentions suicide. Is she overcome by others that she would take her own life or is there some angst that she cannot shed? And then there's the question of self-immolation. She is profoundly struck by the act of a monk who set himself on fire for a much greater cause. She keeps a picture by her as part of her protest. Her silence frustrates her friends but she also becomes somewhat of a confessor. They talk frankly to her with no sign of approval of disapproval, they open up. It's no problem that Gemma is silent. The other characters reflect her and recount aspects about her, such as the time she took pity on a homeless woman and brought her for a bite to eat or how she tried to follow an impulse to adopt a baby while on holiday in Italy. But her vow of silence transforms life around her in an unexpected way.This all sounds quite promising and Mr. Minghella has a pedigree as the screenwriter of The English Patient. However, the play is rendered to mediocrity by its staging and average performance. For example, the actors stand in tableaux while another pair engage. The lighting tends to dim rather randomly so we end up staring at the human mannequins wondering if they're getting anxious as we gawk at them. The actors are largely one-note and display the frustrations of their characters rather than digging into the richer interiors. An exception here is Mr. Dolphin who plays Rob with jabbing humour. Confounding the effort, is a kind of pseudo-profundity running through the text. The music from the Mathew Passion runs in the background and while Gemma and the characters refer to matters of raison d'etre, it is all surface. The use of lent , Christianity and the passion music in a play that has nothing to do with any of those things comes across as artifice. This year you might think of giving up Cigarettes & Chocolate.
