Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons
Theatre Royal, Brighton
March 2023
The average person will speak 123,205,750 words in a lifetime. But what if there were a limit? This play imagines a world where we’re forced to say less. It’s about what we say and how we say it; about the things we can only hear in the silence; about dead cats, activism, eye contact, and lemons, lemons, lemons, lemons, lemons.
Many years ago whilst still a student, I saw Pirandello’s seminal play Six Characters in Search of an Author, an absurdist, metatheatric play about the relationship among authors, their characters, and theatre practitioners. Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons comes across as two actors in search of a play.
The two actors concerned, Jenna Coleman and Aidan Turner, are both competent in their roles as Bernadette and Oliver although Turner has an vocal habit of inflecting downwards at the end of his sentences which means you struggle to hear the last two or three words. It’s ironic in a play about only having 140 words per day to use that the audience don’t hear all of those spoken by Turner.
Coleman fares much better and is the more accomplished of the two performers and the play is adequately directed by Josie Rourke.
The issue here is that it really is a dreadful play which has very little to say about anything and is riddled with inconsistencies. There is no explanation why the ‘Hush Law’ has been implemented in the first place, how it will be policed, or what the punishment for breaking it might be and any allegory to David Cameron’s government policy in 2015 when the play was written is muddled, mystifying and above all, missing.
Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons is a play set in a dystopian, language-rationed world bereft of reason. In today’s world it is the play that is bereft of reason and only two words are required to accurately describe it – very poor.
⭐⭐
Reviewer: Patric Kearns