We all know about the dangers of the internet: you never really know who you’re talking to or who’s tracking your e-movements, so when it’s established in Companion Piece that Dolores and Leonard have met online, you know it’s not as it seems. Companion Piece is the debut of transatlantic group Concorde, which promises to bring US work to the UK and vice versa. With a firm grip on relevant and interesting material, it seems it is off to a good start.
In the opening scenes, we learn that Dolores (Amy Finegan) and Leonard (Mark Arnold) have been talking for a few months on an online forum. Whilst in town for a work conference, she pops by to meet her e-lover. The awkwardness of this first encounter oozes from the stage; Dolores is frantic and nervous, talks a bit too much and rather unsophisticatedly blurts out tricky questions like, “So, are you seeing anyone else?”. Similarly, and throughout his performance, Arnold’s Leonard is a blundering, sexually uncomfortable and slightly uneasy IT guy.
This first scene of the couple sets the pace for what promises to be a comic look at modern relationships, a theme later contributed to by Leonard’s buddy Kip (John Schwab), a frustrated adulterer caught in a midlife crisis who insists that he is “totally fine” and very much in love with his wife. It is Kip who gives the resounding advice, and perhaps core idea behind this play, that “if we were all totally honest with each other about things sexually, I don’t know that anyone would ever be attracted to anyone else”.
In this sense, Companion Piece asks us to address what we call normal. Leonard’s apartment, for example, is the epitome of normal. It’s small, comfortable, and lacks any real sense of personality, a bit like Leonard. He has a normal job, eats normal food and wears normal clothes; however he is, like many people, very lonely. In fact, it is loneliness that bonds the online lovers. Dolores’s loneliness leads her to seek refuge in her pet cat, who she ceaselessly tells stories about, whilst Leonard has a special companion of a very different nature. It is Leonard’s ‘companion piece’ that forces us to question what really is ‘normal’?
This debate seems much more poignant in the first half of the play where I fondly admired how Dolores’ inability to understand Leonard’s companion piece is presented as hostile and intolerant, whilst Arnold’s Leonard is brilliantly easy to sympathise with. However, this is turned on its head in the second half, where suddenly the script takes a more intolerant stance, throwing any sense of understanding of Leonard away and casting him into a ‘weird’ pile that will never integrate back into the ‘normal’ world.
Nevertheless, the interesting and topical issues raised by Companion Piece certainly leave you thinking, and are executed seamlessly by a very capable cast. Although it could have worked better had there not been an interval, this is an inventive and provocative piece of theatre. I look forward to seeing what Concorde does next.
Companion Piece is playing at the Pleasance Theatre until 30 March. For more information and tickets, see the Pleasance Theatre website.