'Incidents In Isolation' is an intiative from the Questors Theatre, London, as they present online monologues recorded in isolation available on YouTube. The one that I watched was titled, "Incident In Oxygen" and was written and directed by Ella Dorman-Gajic and performed by Matthew Saldanha.
It is the first night after the end of lockdown and he goes out on the town with his mates. They do a pub crawl before ending up in Oxygen, the local hot-spot night club. He becomes separated from his mates and at the same time he catches the eye of a young lady who is forward enough to come up to him and chat him up. She's feisty and eager, and just as things were seemingly going well, she deliberately pours her full drink down the front of this trousers as a joke, making it look like he'd been unable to get to the toilet in time! He was the laughing stock and so in shame had no alternative than to return home early.
The cathartic 'punchline' of this story happens long before the end of the monologue, and as such the last part of the play seems both irrelevant and unecessary. It has lost impact now, not that the story was anything out of the ordinary to begin with. It was just a nice tale, nothing special. The kind of tale you'd chat to your bestie about, but nothing to be proud of. Very plain and oridcnary subject matter, with little to sustain the interest. However it was acted sympathetically and with realism by Saldanha.
Reviewer - Matthew Dougall
on - 24/6/20
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