After a brief airing at King’s Head Theatre earlier this year, Keelan Kember ’s latest play, Thanks for Having Me, is getting a longer run in a bigger production in the main house at Riverside Studios, and it is easy to see why.
It is a very funny sitcom, with the fast-paced dialogue delivered by four intelligent, articulate and unarguably good-looking late twenty-year olds as they each negotiate a passage through the choppy waters of contemporary dating without hitting an iceberg. Or at least without hitting another iceberg.
Eligible bachelor Honey is midway through his first date schtick with Maya when his best mate, the melodramatic Cashel, gatecrashes his smooth operation, ruining the vibe with his demolished heart and immediate homelessness due to his own eight-year relationship with the perfect woman unexpectedly collapsing.
As well as giving Cashel use of his spare room, Honey agrees to share with him his top tips for avoiding commitment whilst enjoying sexual success with the ladies, which Cashel puts to immediate use when the kind-hearted Maya sets them all up on a double date with her friend Eloise.
But Honey’s strategem of selective untruths and premeditated timing doesn’t work out as expected for either of the men, with agreeably heart-warming and comic results.
Along the way, there are some seriously smart passages of writing and truly memorable lines, and whilst common sense screams not to overthink a lighthearted comedy, there are shadows cast over the lively wit, albeit that it is not within the remit of a sitcom to untangle all the complexities of 21st-century wooing.
Written from the perspective of the two men, the female characters are generally under-served. This is particularly the case with emotionally fragile Eloise’s salient and urgent points about how shallowly men see women not getting enough airtime, and notably when set against the miraculously fast repair of Cashel’s broken heart, effected by a single dick-led glance at her classically attractive female form. Although Thanks for Having Me is patently more nuanced than this, there is the sense that, in spite of or because of their spurious strategies, the men come out on top.
Neatly directed by Monica Cox, the cast of four features Kember as Cashel, the catastrophising man-child, whom he contradictorily makes rather adorable. Acclaimed screen actor Nell Tiger Free makes her stage debut as Eloise, Adeyinka Akinrinade is a warmly genial Maya, whilst king of cool Honey is an appealingly assured Kedar Williams-Stirling.
Like his comedy, Kember’s characters are well observed, their reticence in affairs of the heart easily relatable to their contemporaries. In a sense, they all succeed on their own terms, showing that you can’t win a game if you’re not in it, and that means sometimes you just have to wait your turn.