Review: Shackled

In some respects it’s easy to see why Ayse Tary’s Shackled was winner of Minotaur’s Creative Writing competition this year. It is, prominently, a play about cancer, a big subject which touches so many people.

But it’s also extremely funny. And it’s the kind of humour which we find in everyday life, and speaks of first-hand experience, and truth. The bedside banter with the nurse. The bluntness with which people talk about their own death… It was refreshing not only to be able to laugh at this kind of situation, but to feel comfortable laughing. It wasn’t a ‘black comedy’, it was just a very honest comedy. We laughed because we empathised.

But it became apparent very early on in Shackled, when we were supposed to laugh, and when we were expected to cry. The banter stopped, the lights dimmed, and the emotional monologues began.

Harry Barker – the protagonist – is by his very nature a happy-go-lucky ‘old school’ sort of character; unsentimental, boisterous and proud. We discover within the opening ten minutes of the piece that he has cancer. Harry Smith stepped naturally and brilliantly into this role. But despite the best efforts to underwrite this character, his emotions got the better of him. In one particularly tear-jerking scene, he reflected on his life, on his regrets, on his role as a husband and a father. Perhaps the tragedy of the play lies in the fact that even Harry, who is so full of life, is destroyed in the end, and is utterly overcome by the cancer that is killing him.

For me, the characterisation of Harry seemed poignant, insightful and very true to life. But where the play triumphed in truth, it lacked in creativity. The brilliant set-up of the story is that Harry has cancer, but he is also serving a prison sentence, and must at all times be chained to a prison officer (played by Michael Clarke.)

What struck me as such a brilliant construct for a play on paper, lost me completely in its execution. These two men are forced to be chained together. Will they get on? Well, yes, actually. They get on quite well. Within the first few minutes of the play that seems pretty clear. There is a distinct lack of conflict in the piece, except perhaps for the fact that whereas the prison guard, Rigby, couldn’t bring himself to talk about the inevitable, Caroline (Harry’s ex, played by Tina Baston,) could talk about little else.

The emotional connection is also lost in the constant breaks in the action, as one blackout follows another, and then another. For The Tab this was an unimaginative, unnecessary and repetitive way of dealing with a change in time.

Extremely well cast, both Smith and Clarke were excellent leads. The rest of the cast were also brilliant. Jess Boyes had impeccable bedside manner as the nurse; Sam Day and Susannah Martin were very convincing kids and Will Berry played the character of the Governor, an almost panto-esque villain who appears once, to check on his dying prisoner, and is completely unfeeling toward him.

As a whole, Shackled was very funny, charming and heartfelt. But it felt more like an episode of a sitcom, than a full length play. The relationship between Rigby and Harry was given no time or consideration to grow, and the characters and plot failed to develop beyond the death that the piece was painfully hurtling towards. Beyond the very truthful and brilliant humour, there was a distinct lack of anything theatrical in the play, and the result was, in my opinion, nothing short of emotional manipulation.