The Gift

Dave Florez
PostScript Productions in association with Park Theatre
Park Theatre

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Nicholas Burns Credit: Rich Southgate
Alex Price, Nicholas Burns and Laura Haddock Credit: Rich Southgate
Nicholas Burns Credit: Rich Southgate
Nicholas Burns and Alex Price Credit: Rich Southgate
Alex Price, Nicholas Burns and Laura Haddock Credit: Rich Southgate

We are all capable of flushing hot and red with guilt at the recollection of past transgressions, but if you received a turd in the post, would you think that decades after the shaming event happened revenge was being wrought by one of those sinned against?

After going through what clues there are amongst the packaging and postmark and doing some amateur sleuthing to no avail, you might write off the experience and move on, resolve to be a better person, report it to the police or, if very angst-ridden, you might seek counselling. Perhaps all of the above.

In Dave Florez’s The Gift, Colin, a man who has clenched his butt-cheeks for forty years, goes full-on existential crisis when his unexpected ‘gift’ arrives in a posh cake box.

Truth be told, his entire world falls into comic dysfunction as he goes about digging up the bodies and, apparently having no friends, obliges his sister, Lisa, and her partner, Brian, to bear the brunt of this irrationality, an indulgence as disproportionate as catastrophising Colin’s spreadsheet analysis of possible perpetrators.

Colin’s appetite for self-recrimination is like a maypole from which Florez hangs any number of tangents, from Brian winding up Colin over e-mail etiquette to faux machismo, that ramp up the laughs per minute.

Along the way, there are a few spells of chuckle downtime, observations about the function of lying in friendships, and then there are the cracks in Brian and Lisa’s relationship that emerge here and there. Her passive-aggressive retorts and his off-the-cuff deflections flash as sparks of truthfulness in this otherwise warmly funny no-one-was-hurt-in-the-making-of-this comedy.

None of this can camouflage the fact that Lisa, Colin and Brian all verge on the unlikeable, with manchild Colin vacillating between epiphany and apocalypse becoming fatiguing.

Florez’s dialogue is comic, and the well-timed delivery from Nicholas Burns as Colin, Laura Haddock as Lisa and Alex Price as Brian is gleefully agile and at times enjoyably bitter.

Adam Meggido’s sprightly direction of the action leaves only just enough time to access tender moments, so the pacy comedy ball is never dropped, essential given that Colin’s later offstage behaviour reaches such extremes that in a parallel universe this would be a tragedy about him having a breakdown of some magnitude.

Audiences will watch this comedy and won't mind that it seems Colin has learnt nothing from his misfortune because they have the gift of knowing how not to react if the same things happens to them.

Reviewer: Sandra Giorgetti

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