“Can you maybe just tell me what is going on? I’m really spooked,” says Brett (Norma Butikofer) in a statement which seems to capture the entire experience of watching Crude Prospects, the latest show by theatre company, Les Foules. Having heard some hype about the company’s previous production – When We Dead Awaken – which featured at Vault Festival last year, it was frustrating to feel neither entertained, nor informed by Crude Prospects. Despite dabbling with big world topics such as the greed of oil companies and global warming, it didn’t fully explore these enough to make a clear point. The play, self-described as a ‘kicked-up Western gone North’, follows Brett’s journey to find her childhood friend Kathy (Nadège Adlam), who works on an off-shore oil rig in Alaska.

Peter Wiedmann’s writing is arguably the play’s biggest success and simultaneously its downfall. Almost immediately we’re dumped into a whirlwind of dialogue between Brett and Wheeler (Brian Tynan), creating an experience similar to tuning in halfway through a random episode in the fourth series of an American drama you’ve not watched before. Here, not only are we suddenly expected to keep up with names of characters and places we’re unfamiliar with (and therefore not invested in), but the script throws around oil-rig jargon and rushed explanations about the science of ice crystals in a manner which alienates its audience. Unlike Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, which carries us through a narrative centred around a largely unknown subject – nuclear physics – whilst making us feel like intelligent spectators, Crude Prospects rattles through a script as if unaware of the audience’s presence. Wiedmann’s writing itself is poetic, and passages of the script are trippy in a fun way, such as the notion of the oil rig appearing like a little dinosaur in the distance. However, we ricochet between bizarre, philosophic spiels about friendship, and Brett’s frantic search for Cathy without ever truly being brought into the story.

Crude Prospects is clearly meant to be funny, and it was unfortunate that many of the jokes fall flat; a gag about Donald Trump and a drawing of a submarine that initially appeared like a penis, received little more than a snort from the audience. One joke which did go down a treat was Brett’s breezy mention of surviving a bear attack – a timely harkening to the now well-known bear scene in Iñárritu’s recent film The Revenant.

In a play where the characters are two-dimensional and fail to develop throughout the narrative, the four strong performers are arguably let down by the narrative’s constraints. Still, Tynan stands out as Wheeler with his humorously effeminate and nasally drawl. He gets a well-deserved chuckle from the audience in the Little Britain-esque scene where he mocks Brett over the phone to a colleague whilst she’s still in the room. Adlam is also captivating in her performance as Kathy.

Tom MacLean’s blues guitar, and Betsy Dadd’s design were fundamental to creating the world which Crude Prospects belongs to. Dadd’s modern art and animated snippets of film – silent reflections of cars driving across a sparse road, or ice floating in the ocean – transport us between locations. Ultimately, not enough building blocks were laid to justify Joe’s (Lennard Sillevis) dramatic tones, and the reunion between Brett and Kathy came as something of an anti-climax. Crude Prospects is performed by four talented actors, however little attempt is made to interest the audience in the story.

 

Crude Prospects is playing Vault Festival until 21 February 2016. For more information and tickets, see www.vaultfestival.com

Photo: Massimo Battista