Your Call sees Alex (Rob Monteiro) battle social alienation through a series of phone calls with hotline volunteers. Hayley Canham’s original play adeptly reckons with some complex themes, which unfortunately get lost amongst a confusing structure and daring content that comes across as more indulgent than sobering.

There isn’t much of a plot to follow in the play. Alex struggles with his family relationships. His absent brother, the favourite, is a drug addict. Alex’s mother has only good things to say about him but she fobs off Alex’s worries with a list of hotline numbers. Interspersed with expositors scenes between Alex and his mother, the play follows Alex calling hotlines, increasingly desperate to form a human connection with a series of callers who refuse to engage with him beyond self-help platitudes.

“Sometimes Your Call is a daringly realistic portrayal of the complexity of grief”

Delivering conflicting stories about his own life, Alex is in full control of his own narrative. But the play hints at his unreliability as a narrator, to mixed results. Sometimes Your Call is a daringly realistic portrayal of the complexity of grief, as a morally ambiguous Alex uses increasingly depraved claims to goad hotline operators into showing him an honest, horrified, reaction. Unfortunately, this is lost in the play’s other, less motivated elements. For example, Alex’s testimony of sexual abuse would be very revealing about his relationship with his brother – if it was true. It is never made clear what is held true in the play which leaves the audience constantly guessing Alex’s motivations.

There is nothing wrong with ambiguity in theatre – when it is executed well. It doesn’t help that Alex’s calls are intentionally provocative. Without anything to tie Alex’s testimonies back to, one can’t help but wonder what the point of including, for example, a scene where Alex testifies that he was molested by his brother, then pretends to masturbate to the shocked response of the operator. These elements end up feeling tasteless and attention-seeking and lose any impact they may have had.

Your Call is about isolation and substance abuse and mental illness and suicide and delusions and bereavement and grief and porn and molestation and fratricide and favouritism. It is bloated with content. The more grounded elements of Canham’s writing are drowned out by the litany of other themes the play tackles, most of which seem utterly disconnected from one another.

“The last thing Your Call needs is another theme to deal with”

For example, Alex is ambiguously mentally ill, sometimes hearing things, and other times experiencing paranoid delusions. It is never made clear how, if at all, this is relevant to the crux of the story. In one scene Alex is paranoid that he is being watched by a man standing outside his apartment. Written during the COVID-19 lockdowns, maybe this is Canham dealing with the anxiety that comes from being confined inside. We wouldn’t know because it never comes up again, and in any case the last thing Your Call needs is another theme to deal with.

The production is not without its strong points. The performances are a pleasure to watch - Monteiro delivers in the demanding role of the protagonist, holding the audience’s attention and juggling both Alex’s casual apathy towards human life and his quiet, vulnerable moments. Irisa Kwok masterfully controls her body language as Alex’s cold and distant mother, a character who could easily have been comically cruel were it not for the subtleties in her performance. Rounding out the cast, Audrey Hammer and Oliver Cooney provide some much needed levity as archetypal hotline volunteers.

The staging, too, is especially strong – director Mia Grant makes excellent use of levels, with the operators sat still whilst Monteiro prowls about the stage, sometimes lying prone on the floor, other times running about yanking posters off the walls. The set is intricately considered, with each prop lending realism and juvenile grunginess to Alex’s flat, right down to the sticky notes on the fridge.

Your Call has a lot it wants you to think about, if you can see beyond the shock factor. As Alex points out early on, he is no villain - at its core, Your Call is about a very human struggle to deal with loss and loneliness. Perhaps, if Canham’s writing was more restrained, this idea could have really shone through and made for a compelling evening of theatre.