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Henry Hitchings's rating
Oikos is lost on the eco trail
By
Henry Hitchings
1 Sep 2010
The Jellyfish is the first fully operational theatre in this country to be made only from recycled and reclaimed materials. Created by a team of nearly 100 volunteers, under the aegis of The Red Room and the Architecture Foundation, it’s an unusual structure that has taken 11 weeks to assemble.
The first of two plays being staged there before the venue is dismantled in mid-October is Oikos, a new piece by Simon Wu. Developed at the National Theatre Studio, it’s a study of rancid domesticity that’s also an apocalyptic vision of environmental meltdown.
As the Thames bursts its banks and London is engulfed, we zero in on the struggles of City slicker Salil, his wife Assana and their daughter Lily. Salil is haunted by images of his Indian childhood, and as his luxurious existence unravels and the elements threaten to overwhelm him and his family, he has to revisit his past to find a path to redemption.
It’s the climate-change theme that makes Oikos at least notionally interesting. One character speaks pregnantly of “the contingency plan”, and Wu’s themes are close to those of Steve Waters’s superb dramatic diptych of that name. But where Waters treated the threat of impending
environmental catastrophe with humanity and a gripping flair, Wu’s writing manages the unlikely feat of being both clichéd and cryptic.
The action is clunky: Topher Campbell’s direction lacks precision, and the use of filmed segments adds little. Neil d’Souza grapples earnestly with the unforgiving role of Salil, and there’s a hyperactive turn from Amy Dawson as his daughter.
Yet at no point does the important subject matter obscure the fact that Oikos is a pretentious, derivative and theatrically undernourished play that fails to exploit the Jellyfish’s handsome potential.
Until September 18. Information: http://www.oikosproject.com
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
Reader views (2)
This play shows that the London theatre is in touch with what is happneing in the world - as large areas of Pakistan are devastated by floods, Oikos sympathetically shows us the devastation on one Indian man's life caused by floods on the Indian sub-continent.
- Dillip, London, 03/09/2010 11:47
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I saw OIKOS last night and found it fascinating the way the playwright, Simon Wu, has cleverly intertwined dramatic narratives of the River Ganges and the River Thames in moving human stories with a mythic dimension. The main character, Salil is a British Indian city banker who has escaped the tragedy of his family being washed away when the Ganges flooded only to find the same thing threatening to happen again in his new Thameside home in London. There is a moment of revelation when he realizes that the tragic effects of gobal warming and flooding are greatly magnified by poverty - in the makeshift ramshackle Jellyfish theatre these words took on a heightened poignancy; as did seeing this play at a time when the poor of Pakistan are suffering the combined tragedy of flooding and deprivation. A thought provoking, well acted and well directed original play in an amazing venue. I felt the message was, if we can't be kind to each other, how can we kind to the earth we live on.
- Derek, London, 01/09/2010 10:57
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