Waterloo East Theatre
Playing until 22nd December 2024
Review {AD-PR Gifted}
There’s a lot that can go wrong at Christmas, from cancelled trains and stranded family members to dry turkeys and dining table bust-ups. In Buddy Thomas’s festive tragicomedy The Crumple Zone, the main characters have plenty of their own yuletide challenges to contend with, including career instability, dodgy temp jobs, and infidelity, to name just a few.
In LAMBCO’s new production of the play, James Grimm sets down a sturdy anchor for the comedy and drama with his charismatic yet vulnerable portrayal of central character Terry, who resides with his housemate Sam (Sinead Donnelly) and her husband Alex (Jonny Davidson) in a shoddy Staten Island apartment. The issue is, Sam has been away on tour for months, in which time Alex has been cheating on her with mall worker Buck (James Mackay). If this didn’t create enough attention in the apartment, Terry also lusts after Buck, who repeatedly rejects his desperate advances.
Thomas’s script is packed with laughs, albeit with some feeling a tad dated in 2024, and the cast bring a great energy (and sturdy American accents) to the fast-paced script. Unfortunately, I often found Helen Bang’s direction a touch too fast-paced — the cast flew through the script rapidly, often talking over each other. While this can sometimes be effective in conveying the frenetic chaos that’s dominating these characters’ lives, it minimises the comedy and dampens the dramatic tension by not giving the dialogue enough room to breathe.
But my primary gripe with The Crumple Zone lies within the script itself rather than any production choices. Act One sets up the premise nicely, and it ends on a great cliffhanger as Sam unexpectedly comes home to surprise Alex for Christmas — while Buck is still there with him.
In Act Two, the narrative loses its way. Rather than letting the tension (and comedy) build by having Alex struggle to hide his infidelity from Sam, she discovers his relationship with Buck almost immediately, making what should have been a pivotal moment in the play feel anticlimactic. Much of the rest of the play then focuses on Sam coming to terms with what’s happened, and while we feel an obvious sympathy towards her, it’s hard to truly empathise with a character we didn’t meet once (bar the occasional voicemail appearance) in Act One.
Bizarrely, Alex and Buck’s story isn’t even given a hint of resolution, leading me to wonder what had happened to these characters once the house lights came up, as opposed to feeling satisfied or moved by the play’s conclusion.
That’s not to say The Crumple Zone fails to entertain — a subplot featuring the intense adulterer Roger (Nicholas Gauci), a man Terry picks up on the ferry, adds a particularly farcical element to the action which gets plenty of laughter from the audience. Terry is undoubtedly given the best lines in the script, which Grimm delivers with a wickedly bitchy glint in his eye but also a sense of buried fragility that occasionally bubbles to the surface. I just wish this production could have lived up to its emotional potential.
A previous off-Broadway hit, The Crumple Zone’s festive charm is sadly diminished by a clunky story structure that left me ultimately feeling unmoved.
Creatives
Writer: Buddy Thomas
Director: Helen Bang
Costumes? Janet Huckle
Technical: Richard Lambert
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