Theatre reviews: The Intervention | Hand Over Fist

LAST year, Dave Florez’s play Somewhere Beneath it all, a Small Fire Burns Still, starring comedian Phil Nichol, became an immediate hit on the Fringe.

The Intervention

Assembly Rooms 
(Venue 20)

Rating: ***

Hand Over Fist

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33)

Rating: ****

Now, Nichol is back in the leading role in another Florez play with an ensemble from the Comedians Theatre Company.

Zac (Nichol) is an alcoholic. His family, friends and fiancée have gathered at his home in Chicago with Jed, an AA counsellor verging on the smug, to stage what’s known in the trade as a “an intervention”. No-one is allowed to leave the room until everyone has said their piece and Zac has agreed to quit the booze. Needless to say, things don’t exactly go according to plan.

A cast of British and American TV actors portray Zac’s nearest and dearest, a poisonous bunch: abusive father, hysterical mother, two-timing girlfriend and a thoughtless oaf of a best mate (this last superbly realised by Inbetweeners actor Waen Shepherd). With family like this, who could blame a man for taking a drink?

Zac is easily the most likeable person here, and the most complex. While the others are close to being caricatures, he is in genuine turmoil. Alcohol may be destroying him, but it’s also keeping him sane. There’s no easy solution, certainly not the clichéd phrases Jed spouts from his AA textbook.

One of Florez’s great strengths as a playwright is his ability to confound expectations, throw our own judgments back in our faces. While Zac certainly manages to show up his friends and family for the bickering fools they are, none of them really develops as a character. People are messed up, and stay messed up, no surprises there, but it doesn’t make for rewarding theatre.

All of which makes for a big contrast from Hand Over Fist, Florez’s other play on the Fringe this year, directed by multiple Fringe First winner Hannah Eidinow. His subject here is no less dark, but the writing sparkles throughout. While it was hard, at times, to recognise the writer of Somewhere Beneath It All in the hackneyed characters of The Intervention, he shines out in this one-woman play about a life fragmenting in the grip of Alzheimer’s.

Actress Joanna Bending is superb as Emily, who is describing the moment she met Josh, her husband of 60 years. But which year was it? In her diseased brain, decades have collapsed together, memories have become cross-wired into the plots of Bergman movies and Beach Boys songs.

Emily is funny, forthright and unsentimental. Sometimes she makes little sense, at other times, she speaks profound and complex truths (“True love lives in sherbet dib dabs and haunted hospitals”). Sometimes she is poignantly self-aware, at other times hilariously disinhibited. Her illness knows no taboos.

As he did in Somewhere Beneath It All, Florez creates the sense of a lively, imaginative person imprisoned by their physical circumstances. His writing is fresh, funny and at times achingly beautiful. By the time our hour with Emily has reached its sweet, sad conclusion, we are reminded again how good he is at turning the tables on his audience and shaking us out of complacency into compassion.

• The Intervention until 26 August. Today 7:05pm. Hand Over Fist until 27 August. Today 1.55pm.