Big things were expected of Same Deep Water As Me, Nick Payne’s eagerly awaited new play, his first since the award-winning Constellations, but this play about two small time Luton ‘no win, no fee’ solicitors falls flat.
Andrew (a subtle Daniel Mays), is a man trying his best to show some decency but temptations just keep getting in his way. Sacked from his London post allegedly for a bit of fiddling, he’s back in his home town in a job he obviously hates when his old school friend Kevin (the always excellent Marc Wooton) walks through the door.
He’s had a shunt with a Tesco’s van and is desperate for compensation. Andrew takes the case on despite knowing that there’s a bit more to Kevin’s story than meets the eye, but he soon finds out what Kev’s up to (“We find ’em, we follow ’em, we prang ’em”) and sleepwalkingly falls in to his world of scams.
Barry (Nigel Lindsay), his boss, is a stolid everyman, more interested in scratchcards, varieties of teabag (“He went on a course,” says Andrew, boggling the mind), and especially Greggs the Bakers of which he’s a connoisseur. His fall back position when flummoxed is to go and get a Steak Bake, or to chant his pastry mantra: “I’m going to Greggs. Is there anything you want?”
We all know a Barry, I’m sure, and Lindsay plays him straightforwardly, but with a surprising dignity. In fact Lindsay is wasted on Barry, very much a peripheral character who never engages with Andrew much, despite their relationship supposedly being central. And that’s the problem with Same Deep Water As Me: it’s a little bit shallow, never getting to grips with the problems inherent in the compensation culture it portrays.
Relying on jokes and one-liners, Payne has neglected to develop his characters in any meaningful way, and it’s only by dint of the actors being so good that he gets away with any sort of play at all. The laughs are easy ones: “I’m sweating like a dyslexic on Countdown,” puffs Barry, while Kev’s wife Jen complains “I feel like I’ve been caught having a wank at the vets” which doesn’t really even make any comic sense (to me anyway: it might make you giggle like a loon I suppose). A complicated joke is told in the semi-darkness of a power cut only for the punchline to be cut off as the power comes back on. Cheap.
Characters are introduced and then disappear with no trace which is a pity as they’re the best thing about the piece. Odd and interesting, they make Andrew and Barry look like what they are: desperate solicitors in a sinking firm. Perhaps that’s the point, but it’s a funny way to make it.
The first half is set in the Luton office, while the second half moves to a courtroom when Kev’s claim is challenged and he and Jen have to go through the ordeal of giving evidence, and Andrew has to defend them in order to save his own neck as he’s in it as deep as they are by now.
Isabella Laughland’s ‘at fault’ claimant brought the only spark that looked like it might kindle into any sort of flame to the courtroom scene, although Wooton’s Kev nearly got there with his marvellously sweary turn as he gets first flustered and then incensed by the solicitor’s cross-questioning.
You sense that a playwright has come to a bit of an ‘I don’t know quite what to do here’ moment when they throw in a fight, and sure enough, there it is towards the end. It’s a bloody good fight, a proper brawl, but it doesn’t seem to serve much of a purpose, and when Andrew suddenly comes across as a social commentator, talking about the lives of people like Kevin made empty by the pursuit of consumer ‘things’, it’s a rolling of the eyes moment. And when even this hackneyed device is followed by a sentence that begins: “When I was four…….” the rolling eyes are joined by a great big sigh of exasperation.
When a writer who produced something like Constellations is reduced to this formulaic an ending it’s perplexing and sad, and makes you wonder if we’ll see great things from Payne again, or whether he’s floundering so badly that he’ll never quite make it back to the shore.
WHAT: Same Deep Water As Me, by Nick Payne
WHERE: Donmar Warehouse, Seven Dials, London
WHEN: Until September 28, Mon – Sat 7.30pm, Thurs & Sat 2.30pm
TICKETS: £7.50 – £35
FOR MORE INFO: CLICK HERE: http://www.donmarwarehouse.com/whats-on/donmar-warehouse/2013/the-same-deep-water-as-me
WOULD I SEE IT AGAIN: Strangely yes, but only for the performances
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