Soho theatre’s latest hot transfer from this summer’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe is New York playwright Will Eno’s Oh, The Humanity, a staccato observation of life, death and everything in between.
Five short plays take us on a quirky and darkly comic journey, each piece seemingly unconnected to the others. From a resigned American coach forced to explain a year of complete failure to the press to a wide eyed air hostess addressing a group of relatives who have lost loved ones in a plane accident with no survivors, this is pure car crash territory. Sometimes the vulnerability and awkwardness is painful to watch but you just can’t help looking.
Director Erica Whyman – who will soon take up her role as Deputy Artistic Director of the RSC – keeps each of the five plays fresh and different. The penultimate piece turns the tables – and lights – on the audience as the cast become photographers moulding us into their vision. Employing the most naturalistic of acting, it leaves you feeling suddenly as exposed as the characters themselves, with 200 audience members proving no competition for two adept actors. The final piece shakes things up for again, revealing the absurdity of the stage in a hilariously surreal sketch.
Tony Bell, Lucy Ellinson and John Kirk quick-change their way through the five shorts, transforming from insensitive air hostesses to hippy, disagreeable photographers in moments. The most engrossing of all the plays feels like it stepped straight out of a Woody Allen film as Bell and Ellinson film over analytical, mundane dating agency videos; Ellinson’s heartbreakingly awkward character forgetting to tell viewers her name and excitedly claiming to like both the outdoors and indoors, while Bell boasts of his skills as an average grocery shopper, his fixed smile painting a picture more suited to attracting a fellow psychopath than a romantic pairing.
While each of the plays are unrelated to the other, common themes run throughout, the most prominent of all being human interaction; how people can feel alone even when there is someone else in the room. It is truly a production about nothing and everything; tackling love, loss, life, death, belonging, loneliness, coming together and pushing people away, all in just 90 minutes.