THEATRE REVIEW: The Swearing Jar - Squires Performing Arts Centre, Nottingham.

'The Swearing Jar' is a play with songs by Canadian author Kate Hewlett. Why Nottingham’s barely-visible theatre company New Perspectives has chosen to produce it is anyone’s guess: presumably, it looked a better prospect on paper than it turned out to be when stood up - but one wonders why someone didn’t notice it wasn’t working during the rehearsal process and quietly pull the plug. That way, both actors and audience would’ve been spared a lot of unnecessary pain. And this was painful: a tepid sitcom-styled script interspersed with a few tepid acoustic songs that sound like the work of someone who’d learned their first three chords earlier that afternoon. 

Generic characters routinely animated by actors who were barely audible - more projection needed from them all. And direction that evinces all the imagination of a person setting the table for a meal for one. The plot, as well as being thin, is cliched and trite: a newly-pregnant couple are delighted at the prospect of becoming parents but the woman, wishing to set a good example for the new arrival, invents the idea of a swearing jar to which they will contribute whenever one of them effs or blinds; the idea being to give the kid ‘a little something’ when they’re older. Yet the woman, a frustrated songwriter, has a roving eye and soon forms a liaison with a ‘bookshop clerk’ who (wouldn’t you know) is a frustrated musician. The play’s ‘moment of crisis’ comes when their first tentative outdoor snog is witnessed by her mother-in-law (do such bad luck incidents really happen anywhere except in bad plays?), and is compounded when her unaware husband dies of a brain aneurysm that he’d kept secret from his wife. It would take exceptionally charismatic performers to turn this mouldy sow’s ear into anything vaguely resembling a plastic purse; sadly, it doesn’t get them here. 

Although Paige Round and Joe Wiltshire Smith shared a believable chemistry as the couple, they failed to make them anything more than the generic ciphers they are. Stanton Wright as the bookseller sadly barely registered at all, and Tanya Myers as the mother-in-law not from hell but from one of its distant suburbs, did what she could with a paper-thin character but ultimately the sparseness of the material defeated her. As mentioned, audibility became a serious problem at several points, mostly notably when Round was giving the low-down on her husband’s undisclosed illness and her voice lost the battle with the audience’s bronchial interjections. Her singing voice, it must be said, has a fine, plangent quality which it would be good to hear in more worthy material. 

Ultimately, this was a venture doomed from the start: because if you don’t have a text, you don’t have a production. The mystery is why an Arts Council funded theatre company chose to waste its (and the public’s) resources on such a blatant piece of (I’m afraid there’s no other word for it) rubbish. 

Reviewer - Paul Ashcroft
on - 25.2.23