Game review, Almeida Theatre

So you're fed up with paintballing because it's starting to feel tame, and then someone tells you about this new game where you stalk people around their own house and shoot them with tranquilliser darts. Women cost more because the dose has to be more carefully calibrated, but they take credit cards and you can get four shots for two on a Wednesday. And don't worry that this game too will start to feel tame, because the children in the house are growing apace. As soon as they reach seven you can shoot them with impunity. Welcome to Game.

Game is Mike Bartlett's new play at The Almeida. It is a short but complex piece for which the theatre has been reconfigured as four camouflage-covered hideouts where the audience, banked on benches, peer silently into a smart suburban house like twitchers on the North Norfolk shores seeking sight of avocets. Or hunters stalking Game. The hunter's sense of solitary vigil is recreated by the issuing of headsets through which all sound is relayed. It's just us and the actual players who suddenly appear in the hideouts laughing and fighting and loading and aiming their guns at the hapless couple inside.

In the early stages of the Game random shots render the inhabitants senseless as they wearily try to find private space and time to conceive. Later, when their son arrives and takes to living in a box to avoid being hit, it renders them senseless at a point where they are finally making sense of their lives. What other work might they get, they wonder, that would provide them with such a wonderful home and good income?

In conclusion: Bartlett is endlessly inventive. When on form as with Earthquakes in London he creates a narrative tour-de-force. When off form, we get turkeys like 13. Timed at 60 minutes Game stops while the players and the audience are still ahead. Under Sacha Wares' direction it's an interesting, meticulously executed what-if.

References
Game, Almeida, Tickets


Almeida Theatre, Almeida Street, London N1 1TA.    Run ends April 4.