From my previous experiences of surrealist plays, the director’s clarity of purpose can make the difference between feeling you’ve had a bad hallucinogenic trip or feeling you’ve enjoyed something that interests parts of you other plays do not reach.
As the title might suggest, The Apocalypse Bear Trilogy is a bit of a mindscrew, so hooray that director James Christensen has a clear vision for this quirky and entertaining work.
In this three-scene play, Apocalypse Bear (that is the bear’s name) seems for all the world like a CBeebies character. He makes after-school snacks and opens the door to the postman, who is as unphased by seeing him as Jeremy or Sonia. This is clearly another reality.
Apocalypse Bear, however, is much less benign than he appears; he knows quite private things and incongruously exploits this knowledge, meting out hurtful put-downs and piquing the audience’s need to understand this ambiguous presence.
And just how old is this child who chats online with a 27-year-old gay man in Zagreb but has to have his after-school snack made for him? Is Sonia the lonely student ingratiating herself in the hope of making an ursine friend, or is she the divorcée that Apocalypse Bear injures with his unkind remarks?
The final scene is as much a tease as a conclusion. Sonia and Jeremy are a couple of sorts, but any normality is undermined by the artificiality of Jeremy’s overcompensating kindness and patience, whilst Sonia seems oblivious to the insincerity, too needy with anxieties verging on neurosis.
The reappearance of Apocalypse Bear leaves more questions than answers, though it depends somewhat on which questions you had.
It is human nature to try to find order in things and it is the essence of live performance that each viewer has a unique experience of a shared event. Given those truisms, sharing my own interpretation of The Apocalypse Bear Trilogy is very likely to say more about me than about the play as our terms of reference are unlikely to converge.
Probably the most useful thing I can say is that you should go and see the play for yourself. Christensen directs with clarity, holding up a lamp so that you can find your own way through the weirdness rather than leading you towards a view that would be more his than yours.
It is a very entertaining 80 minutes with an undertow of amusement rather than comedy, although there are also a few laugh-out-loud moments. Remi King achieves a lot of characterisation from inside the bear costume, whilst Gassan Abdulrazek’s Jeremy and Siddy Holloway’s Sonia make anomality convincingly natural.
Christensen’s vision is supported by a powerfully evocative soundscape (curated by him) which comes together neatly with thought-through lighting from Alex Lewer and AV projections by Nicky Davis, each subverting the domestic surroundings hinted at by Georgie White’s set where, again, things are not as they seem on the surface.
If this sounds a bit Twilight Zone, I can only say that normal is overrated and there many things in life that we don’t completely understand but it doesn’t stop us from enjoying them.