THEATRE REVIEW: Failure Studies - King's Arms Theatre, Salford.

“Failure Studies” is a new Kafkaesque dark comedy that whips through a range of themes, but tacitly is an examination of the modern obsessions with success and failure. The production’s artistic ambition is high: the execution, especially in the script, is uneven. This evening’s performance was staged by Precarious Theatre at the King's Arms, Salford, as part of the Greater Manchester Fringe Festival.

The solid core of the piece was Luke Richards’ performance as George, the mature-age intern. A physically enormous actor, Richards began the show with a series of early-morning routine tasks that he articulated with caveman-like grunts, while a recorded voiceover bleated out a stream of those annoyingly perky motivational memes that run through everybody’s social media feeds. Dressed and ready for a day at the office, George entered his workplace, and promptly transformed his fluid physicality into that of an enormous chicken. It was that sort of show.

There were a lot of very clever power-play switches between George the court-jester intern and Marc the megalomaniac editor, which were acted with great energy and dynamism by Richards and David Allen. As Marc, founder and editor of an academic journal called “Failure Studies”, David Allen was almost Rik Mayall on steroids. The play’s sharpest ideas and satire were delivered by him, and there were no boundaries that his character would not cross. The most lacerating moments were to do with him running an advertisement for a non-existent job that Britain’s 1.64 million unemployed would each pay £1.00 to apply for – and getting away with it. This culminated in a tall, escalating exchange with George where every failure of George’s life (he had tried a range of jobs in the Arts before becoming a “Failure Studies” intern) were brought out and examined, until George had to concede he was now only fuelled by spite and envy at other people’s successes. Overloaded with frustration, George made his move. And if the play had stopped there, it would have been a very successful piece.

But it didn’t.

The third character, Babe, was gamely played by Francesca Maria Izzo, and I got the general impression that the playwright didn’t quite know what to do with her. Very thinly-written, her main purpose was to be someone for Marc to talk to when George was making chicken noises. She spent most of the first half as a put-upon co-editor of “Failure Studies”; but in the second half had a lot more of the focus as Marc was out of action, and she was now holding up a very strange and irrelevant storyline about the Sea Peoples of antiquity somehow surviving into the modern world and infiltrating the “Failure Studies” editorial office. It didn’t contribute anything theatrically, and Izzo had little to work with.

Liam Grogan’s direction was clear and graceful, making good use of both physicality and stillness. I was a tiny bit concerned about the stage set consisting of loose sheets of A4 paper scattered all over the desk and floor: sometimes the actors had to cross the stage quite quickly, and I did see an actor go into a tiny mini-skid on a piece of paper at one point.

Marco Biasioli took some unusual routes to explore his themes in his script. It didn’t always work, especially in the second half, but one thing I can say: he was never trite or clichéd. And in an age where we are daily bombarded with propaganda on these themes, that is quite an achievement.

Reviewer - Thalia Terpsichore
on - 12.9.21