In the shadows: Paul Knight (Lawrence), Lee Thomas (Gary) Roberta Mair (Sophie) Antoinette Boateng (Jess). Picture by Cory Roberts
Play: The Waiting Room
Theatre: Lost Theatre
Playwright: Serge Rashidi-Zakuani
Review by Mesha McNeil
The Waiting Room, Serge Rashidi-Zakuani’s latest play, may sound uninspiring but in reality the setting is far removed from what we understand it to be. Stanley Kubrick loaded with sinister undertones spring to mind.
Photographs and articles plaster the walls. Patients burst in through large double doors directly onto the stage, yet these same doors seal shut when they try and escape.
As escape seems impossible, characters are left with little else to do than share their stories. Friends Sophie (Roberta Mair) and Jess (Antoinette Boateng) have escaped a car crash with minor injuries. Michael Duah’s Ade and Jermaine, played by Jason Lazarus, are desperately searching for their friend who was stabbed during a fight at a party.
Former banker Lawrence (Paul Knight) recalls being in a car crash with his wife and believes she is dead while Gary, played by Lee Thomas, is extremely reluctant to reveal the events that led to him to the waiting room.
With so many characters, the first half of the play is consumed with setting up their back stories and proves to be the weakest part of the play. The characters sit around the waiting room until the interval asking “Who am I?”, “Who are you?”, and “What are you doing here?”
Before long bonds form and conflicts arise as the play crawls to a predictable revelation by the interval. The slightly stagnant pacing of the first half is saved by the five “shadows” (Alice Bounsau, Frankie Mae, Aaron Dinnall, Adam Njenga and Maria Figgins) who often steal the scenes. They slink and stalk across the stage in grotesque fashion with manic expressions on their face.
Serving as flashbacks, they crawl around the patients, whispering and echoing bits of dialogue and acting out scenes from the patients’ recollections, which adds a much needed emotional context to the play.
The second half makes up for any initial shortcomings. After a disconnect between the audience and the patients in the first half, an emotional investment in the fate of the characters is injected into the second. Rosie Secker is superb as the chirpy waiting room receptionist, while Mair, Boateng and Thomas are compelling.
Serge Rashidi-Zakuani (also known as SRZ) saves the best for last and delivers meaty theological ideas on life and death. Described as a “Christian play,” there are a lot of complex and interesting ideas about life that will sit deep with an audience, whatever their religious belief.
This is definitely a play worth seeing.
The Waiting Room runs until Sunday 16 September 2012.