The Crocodile

In this impeccable show, every element – text, cast, direction, costumes, set design, sound and lighting – all cohere into a brilliant piece of theatre.  It is fun, it is funny, it is sharp and dazzling, and we are often dumbfounded at just how good it is – several cuts above so much else that is on offer.

Ivan (James Cerche) and Zac (Joey Lai), both actors, are at the zoo.  Ivan is a man who is, in Henry James’ phrase, someone on whom everything is lost.  Desperate for attention, desperately conceited – and deluded - he is an actor who performs his own material for ever diminishing and unforgiving audiences.  Zac tries to tell him, in the kindest, most tactful way, that perhaps show business may not be for Ivan.  Could it be time Ivan tried something else?  But like many an uninspired, impervious thespian before him, Ivan blames the shallow, insensitive public.  He compares them to the dumb zoo animals in their cages.  He is cut to the quick that he was not invited to Zac’s dinner party the night before.  Angrily, he teases one of the dumb animals, a new addition to the zoo, a crocodile.  Which promptly eats him.  That could be the end.  No.  It’s just the beginning.

Dostoevsky never finished his short story about a dull government clerk eaten by a crocodile, but it has provided a most original inspiration for UK writer Tom Basden.  He has not merely taken off from the story: he has made it a fable for our time, a story of celebrity culture, of the phenomenon of being famous for being famous. 

Ivan survives.  Better still (for him), he inhabits the unfortunate crocodile, he takes it over.  Inserting himself into the crocodile’s limbs and other organs, he can dance, sing, clown around and even spout the sententious rubbish that made him such a failure pre-crocodile.  But now folks love it.  Naturally, Ivan ignores the fact that his growing fame is due to the crocodile phenomenon – and not to his talent and wisdom in which he never ceased to believe. 

As a fable, there’s not much story per se, but what Basden does with its implications, permutations, and painful satire is unfailingly inventive, very funny and hugely entertaining.  He has clearly had a lot of fun – and so do we.

The dialogue sparkles and it keeps hitting home.  Basden adds a love triangle in which Zac pursues Ivan’s old flame, Anya (Jessica Stanley), a befrilled beauty who’s as deep as a puddle, but she wavers: now that Ivan is famous, she’s not so sure about Zac.  Meanwhile, there is a bad-tempered zookeeper (Cait Spiker) who is dismayed at the loss of the croc, but then as the crowds gather, paying enormous fees, well, maybe it’s not so bad.  Spiker, identified in the program as ‘Swing’, brilliantly transforms into a multitude of instantly recognisable other characters and breaks the fourth wall as a sort of Chorus and ringmaster to this circus, plus a little old man with a dog, plus a restaurant table as well as the waiter.  She, like the rest of the cast, never puts a foot wrong.

Joey Lai is very tall man, but he uses it – with grace at full height, when he dances, and hilariously when he grovels.  His Zac is a not-so-bright schemer; his phoney ‘concern’ for his friend and his dismay when things go awry could not be clearer.  Jessica Stanley gives us an Anya as an airhead portrayed with the most stately, dignified, asinine ludicrousness.  And James Cerche never wavers, even when naked, in his portrayal of an opportunist in pursuit of the one thing that really matters to him: attention.

Then there is Dann Barber’s set design, another in a string of his inspired, suggestive constructions: here, two rough off-white walls in which there are ingenious and unexpected entrances and windows.  His costumes (supervised and realised by Alexandra Aldrich), are a strange combination of medieval and commedia dell’arte – the men and Swing in varied shades of grey while Anya under a towering red wig is all hoop skirt, lace, ruffs and furbelows.  There is no rational reason for this, but we don’t puzzle over it: it’s all in keeping with the bizarre, absurd utterly theatrical version of reality established from the first moments.  The grey palette continues into the head and claws of the crocodile – and the eye-catching ‘simulated nudity’ which follows. 

What director Cassandra Fumi (and producers Cerche and Stanley) gives us here, apart from a cracking pace and invention, is a unity of style.  As well as that commedia dell’arte feel there is more than a touch of ‘Buffon’, a mode in which the actors quite consciously mock the characters they play.  There is no one at all ‘likeable’ in The Crocodile.  There is no one to identify with or sympathise with.  God forbid.  Instead, we have a polished, professional, coruscating, very entertaining evening that speaks to our times now.  See it.

Michael Brindley

P.S.: it might be worth checking Gabriel Bethune’s sound.  Great as it is, at times it drowns the dialogue – but that maybe depends on where one is sitting.  

Photographer: Jack Dixon-Gunn.