What begins as an easy comedy about new neighbours turns into something darker in Jason Hall’s new play at Trafalgar Studios 2.
It is appropriate, given the playwright’s name, that all of Third Floor takes place in a hallway. This hallway is on a floor – third, presumably – of a block of new-build shared ownership flats where two residents, known only to us by their flat numbers, 11 and 12, strike up an unlikely friendship.
Well-spoken and head-girlish, Emily Head’s 12 is a good girl who can only swear in a whisper and is immediately disdainful of her new neighbour in 11 (Craig Gazey), an uncouth joker prone to drunken rants. However, after a dubious start the pair begin to bond, helped by their shared anger over the rubbish routinely left outside flat 10. Their inept attempts to deal with the problem – fuelled by a disastrous combination of English reserve and youthful inconsideration – soon spiral out of control, and with it their tenuous friendship.
Gazey and Head play the parts well, and there are some nice comic moments in Hall’s script, such as 11 talking to his Henry vacuum cleaner as though a pet, and brushing off a moment of misunderstanding between him and 12 with an unthinkingly coarse “I don’t s**t on my own doorstep.” However, the hallway set poses limitations on both the action and the script, meaning the play is a series of short scenes rather than a flowing whole.
It takes a while to get into its stride, too, and when the rather dramatic denouement comes, it feels somewhat out of place given the comic lead up; perhaps that’s the point. But Hall’s play does latch on to some bigger issues: community responsibility vs individualism; the blandness of modern living; and, not least, the difficulty of getting on the property ladder. And anyone who lives in a flat whose communal spaces they must share with unelected strangers can identify with the annoyances, and sometimes moral dilemmas, that brings.
CB