Ticking refers to the clock, counting down what might be the last hour in the life of a young Englishman called Simon. He’s been held in a grubby prison cell in a Chinese prison for four years, but now his time is up and he faces imminent death by firing squad. You assume that it’s drugs, but in the first of a series of unsettling revelations, we learn that he’s actually here for stabbing a prostitute to death. Suddenly he seems to become a lot less sympathetic — unless, of course, he didn’t do it.
The play is the first from the writer and director Paul Andrew Williams, who has previously made acclaimed films such as London to Brighton and Song for Marion. Here he revels in the intimate (or squashed) character of the Trafalgar Studios’ tiny second studio. The auditorium is so small, there’s no point turning the lights down — we are practically sitting on stage anyway — and the same fluorescent lights stare down on players and audience alike. There is no escape.
It’s a powerful, concentrated performance by Tom Hughes, with his unblinking, droopy-lidded stare and sudden anger, but there’s no getting round the fact that the character of Simon is pretty unlikeable. He finds some satisfaction and solace during his last hour on earth in insulting his Chinese prison guard and calling him Charlie. He becomes even less likeable when his parents turn up, reverting to petulant little boy, weltering in self-pity and blame.
Niamh Cusack as his mother, Sylvia, is deeply affecting, kindly, hesitant, distraught, the universal mum who will always believe her little boy is innocent, and Anthony Head is entirely convincing as the slightly stuffy, remote father, Edward, still given to lecturing his son, even now. Between them, they make an impeccably English middle-class couple, with their village life, their Volvo estate and Classic FM — but destroyed by their son’s fate. Or is there something of relief in Edward���s manner?
Less convincing is the writing itself, more so as the play progresses. Indeed, at one point it looks as if the explanation for a nice, well-brought-up boy such as Simon going off the rails with drugs and hookers is going to be the most plodding and lumbering cliché in the book. Mercifully, we are spared this. Still, Williams tries hard to convince us that people like Simon take the path of self-destruction as a result of family dysfunction, rather than, say, because they were drawn to the pseudo-glamour of it, or perhaps because they were too lazy to attempt anything else. In fact, in Simon’s case, the cause of his going astray is pinned on a single traumatic experience when he was 13, which seems even more psycho-illogical.
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Another reservation concerns the mood of that last hour of his life in the company of his agonised parents. Is violent shouting, hysterical blame and recrimination really what takes place in these final moments? Or rather expressions of love, regret and a lot more silence? Williams’s take is that, in that last hour, with death nearly upon you, you are free to say whatever you want, to let it all out. And what Simon says, essentially, is that it’s all his parents’ fault, in an ugly flood of embittered accusation and nasal mucus.
When he is brought his requested final meal — baked beans on toast and a pint of Guinness — it seems wholly plausible that he should find he can’t eat it, but less plausible that he should throw it at the wall in a fury. Hughes does fling his dinner tray with admirable force and precision, though, so that as many as a dozen baked beans stay adhering to the wall until the guard comes and scrapes them off. Jackie Lam, as the guard, without a word to say, gives a memorable performance of expressionless officialdom, occasionally unable to hide his sheer contempt for this shouty, weepy, tantrum-throwing westerner.
The acting is powerful, as is the narrative tension of not knowing whether Simon will be granted a last-minute reprieve or not. It’s an interesting foray into the theatre for Williams, if not entirely successful.
Ticking
Trafalgar Studios, London SW1
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