Pick Up

• Gareth K Vile
• 26 August 2019

Drugs and their dangers

The ensemble cast of Uninvited Party are full of energy and wit: this dynamic, short and fragmented look at addiction covers a life wasted through alcohol and a career threatened by cocaine with compassion and a style that marries choreography and short scripted scenes. While it never rises above the presentation of drug abuse as a social evil and fails to delve deeper into the characters – the young design student is a stereotypical tortured creative – it presents the scenarios fairly and with a fluid impressionism that keeps the narrative rapid and concise.

Pick Up is a morality play, and does little more than calculate the activities of the addict: when a daughter confronts her mother, there is little emotional power, since the arguments have not been weighted to anything other than an ultimate condemnation. The few lighter scenes – a night out on a binge is depicted with dramaturgical cunning – lend some context to the stories, but it becomes an unrelenting series of horrible moments, culminating not in tragedy but a mundane failure of care.

Uninvited have an enthusiasm and sense of dramaturgy that captures the more excitable moments of drug use, and this seems to be moving towards a distinctive style of physical and spoken theatre: the moral righteousness of their treatment of this subject, however, does not quite break through into finding their perfected form.

theSpace @ Surgeons Hall, run ended.