I am continually amazed by the versatility of Dennis Kelly: the writer of recent West End mega-hit Matilda, as well as the creator of the gut-bustingly funny sitcom Pulling. He seems to have his main line of work as the craftsman behind a series of gritty, taut and richly poetic plays about modern people being thoroughly unpleasant to each other. Whether it’s post-apocalyptic nightmares or teenagers callously killing each other to get out of trouble, Kelly has a style all to himself.  He approximates the cadences of contemporary colloquialisms while weaving into them surprisingly ornate language and intricate structures, all underwritten with a taut viciousness that makes for an uncomfortable viewing experience.

 

It is a style that is not done justice in this production of Orphans, although an awful lot of good stuff is achieved. It is an actor-driven show, with Silas Lee’s Liam entering the apparent domestic bliss of sister Helen (Rebecca Philips) and her boyfriend Danny (David Gilbert) covered in blood and thoroughly suspect, following the beating of an Asian man outside. This may be the problem with it: it was proposed by the three actors themselves, and  could bear the hallmarks of a show with an under-powerful director. But first, the positives:  Lee gives a beautifully nervy performance as the weasly, mercurial Liam: he delivers the endlessly circular Kellyisms with the most proficiency, his inarticulacy achieving a sort of poetry that turns this pathetic little man into something nearing sympathetic. Gilbert has a convincingly mature calm while Philips has something indefinably distant at the heart of her performance that beguiles: is it guilt, detachment, stress? These performances are highly accomplished.

 

However, they don’t work as a unit, and this is the problem with the show. Watching a play like this should be like listening to a bowstring sliding down a razor-wire, the tension and nerviness building up to a horrifying pitch. Instead it never gains the kind of high-octane, fast paced horror that Kelly’s text requires for a convincing performance. Rather, the actors are frustratingly just milliseconds away from the right response times, never quite keeping up with the emotional pitch of the plot, especially in the extremely volatile, and frankly underwhelming, last act.

 

Is it worth seeing? Yes. It has interesting things to say about our connections to family and strangers in the modern city. And choices such as the entirely bleak décor are successful (the same cannot be said of an entirely pointless physical theatre sequence and random loud transition noises). But this is a showcase to demonstrate how good these actors are, without the strong hand of the director properly fusing them together, managing pace and the indefinable but utterly essential matter of tone. These are First Years of great promise, but there’s a long distance between just being very good and producing an entirely satisfactory version of a tough text.