Susan Gray, Sum (2014)

I saw Susan Gray's excellent science fiction play Sum at the Bread and Roses, in Clapham, last Saturday night. There are still a few tickets available for the final three performances, at the end of this week (Thu Dec 4th - Sat Dec 6th, 7:30pm - 9:00pm) and I urge you to snap then up.

Sum is a play about the early days of a hivemind, set in a blasted near-future and tracing, through a sinuously threaded string of intense set-piece scenes, the tension between assimilation and individuality. The direction, by Chris Callow Jr, very effectively focuses attention where it needs to be: on the performances and the words; and the acting of the all-female cast is uniformly excellent. Where so much of the dramatic force depends on the integrated work of the whole company it would be invidious to single performances; but, that said, Lydia Kay as Carrie/Lan does extraordinarily well with the technically tricky business of acting two rather different characters at once; Melanie Crossey brings real electricity to Syne's hopes of becoming the 'head' of this new acephalic entity. Gray's play is at once an imagintive new intervention into a venerable SF trope, and a meditation upon theatre itself. Callow, who trained at the Athenian Stage in Greece, knows very well how the interaction between individuated 'characters' and a group-mind 'chorus' determined the very shape of drama in Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; and Sum feels in one sense like a modern re-evaluation of the core structures of theatre itself.  Highly recommended.