A sharply written and darkly funny character study, Dave Florez’s witty three-hander dissects friendship, fixation, and fragile masculinity with dark comedic flair.
★★★☆☆
The premise of Dave Florez’s new play The Gift is straightforward: forty-something Colin receives a grotesque package in the post. This distressing delivery serves as a catalyst for the entire story, with Colin’s life and fixation on the titular gift—Who sent it? Why?—rapidly unravelling, causing him to question not just who he could have irked enough to send him something so heinous, but his entire existence. His sister Lisa and her husband Brian—also Colin’s best, and apparently only, friend—complete the three-hander.
There’s a touch of Seinfeld to the play, in not just the set design—with Sara Perks’ kitchen-living room combo lending the whole piece a sitcom vibe—but the characters’ interactions and the plot’s focus on something so trivial. Instead of obsessing over soup or squares of toilet paper like the aforementioned 90s hit, Florez’s characters devote endless time trying to decipher, from a spreadsheet of 150+ people, who the sender could be. “It’s the inciting incident of my life,” Colin laments at one point. For Colin—and partly for Lisa and Brian—the event is completely all-consuming, and some of the funniest moments come from his increasingly elaborate (and unhinged) attempts to crack the case. In one memorable scene he transforms his kitchen cupboards into crime scene investigations, complete with pins, strings and newspaper cuttings à la that famous It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia meme. Lisa and Brian do their best to help solve the mystery, all the while fearing for Colin’s ever-deteriorating sanity. This would work slightly better if the characters weren’t so insufferable. By the midpoint of the play, it’s hard not to sympathise with anyone who might feel tempted to send Colin such a gift themselves.
The plot is razor-thin, yet runs at 2 hours and 15 minutes including its interval. In remaining confined to its single location, the dialogue has to pack a punch—and fortunately, Florez’s use of language is snappy and well-observed—but in lingering around this single premise for such a long duration, it almost becomes metafictional, a reflection of the characters’ own obsessive identities. The script is sharp and humorous with clever wordplay but it could do with some judicious trimming and often feels like the material would be more impactful in a one-hour piece.
For all its silliness, the skill of the play’s ensemble manages to keep you invested. The cast have great chemistry: Alex Price is brilliant as blokey, swaggering Brian, the perfect antithesis to Colin’s fragile manchild. Lisa’s character arc is an important one and Haddock does superbly bringing it to life. Florez’s script is funny, and there’s a rhythm to it with welcome call-backs to earlier moments that makes it lively and often engrossing. When the play tries to reach for broader themes, however, we get a bit lost. Colin is wildly narcissistic, and by making him so, we aren’t left pondering any wider meaning. The play doesn’t make a statement about modern-day vengeance so much as ask how someone could possibly reach their forties behaving like such a spoilt brat.
The ending leaves a few questions unanswered, but there’s something genuinely heartening in seeing how this trio ultimately sort themselves out. The gift of the title is revealed to have a double meaning: “Not everyone gets two people who care,” Colin notes, “some people have no one.” Despite being such a challenging person to be around, Colin is loved, even if it takes getting this particular package to notice. As the play draws to a close with a decidedly happy ending, you realise you’ve been rooting for them all along. To have pulled that off despite the characters’ copious shortcomings is a testament to a strong team.
The Gift is a solid effort from Florez and director Adam Meggido, and a gift-ed group of performers. Smart, funny and occasionally poignant. While it doesn’t quite nail its brief, it’s an entertaining exploration of obsession and relationships and worth a theatre trip.
The Gift will be performed at Park Theatre until 1 March.
Words by James Morton
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