SPARK

Director Belle Hansen certainly knows how to put on a show.  Here, performances sparkle, the choreography – performed by an excellent cast – is excellent, and she fills. the wide but simple set with so much invention and activity that at times you don’t know where to look.  SPARK is a sort of fable-dream-nightmare about how the search for love is entwined with – or disastrously compromised by – internet technology.  Ryan Henry’s text is witty and insightful, ironic, satiric, very funny – and, underneath, very sad too. 

Lovelorn Simon (Ryan Henry himself in a performance that’s tough on the character) logs on to SPARK, a fictitious dating app.  Or he thinks he does.  It’s a dream: through the show Simon’s phone battery is dying (the percentage left is projected on a huge screen). Can he solve his problems before the phone dies?  The phone is the ‘ticking clock’, it’s life and death in Simon’s desperate search for love.  The app not what he expected, and he gets more than he bargained for. (Henry has also said that we might think SPARK is like Grindr, but ‘In actuality, it is a culmination of all the worst traits that dating apps have to offer.’)  Worse, this app is loaded – or riddled – with singing, dancing bots, all in white, who provide a cacophony of mixed-message advice. 

As Simon travels through a series of failed or never-even-got-off-the-ground relationships – Peter (Joshua Gordon), Barty (Ryan Haran), Leo (Ozzy Breen-Carr), Tom (Rupert Bevan) – we start to see that the problem just might be Simon himself…  His evasive, self-protective complaint is that there is just no spark.  What he means is no love (or lust) at first sight.  It's the shallow, entirely visual aspect of gay – and straight – culture.

The chief bot is Iris (Cassidy Dunn) – who curiously is a dead ringer for Simon’s wise and affectionate real-life housemate.  Bot Iris, unlike the housemate, is almost gratingly well-meaning, muddled, self-deprecating but so, so sincere in wanting to help Simon.  That may be Iris’ own quest too…

Iris is a fabulous character.  Or could be.  Cassidy Dunn (who’s also the dramaturg) looks great, moves beautifully and has an irresistible stage presence, but for some reason elects to shout all her dialogue at a near incomprehensible pace.  Could Belle Hansen understand her?  It’s too bad because from what we can understand, Iris has some of the most important – and funny – dialogue in the show. 

Ryan Henry has said that he wants a fast pace. Well, he's got it.  Perhaps Belle Hansen took him a little too literally.  At times SPARK may be just too frenetic, and scenes that are slower and quieter – such as the moving Simon and Peter encounter, aided by Joshua Gordon’s performance - are some of the most effective…

But there’s a formal or structural problem with SPARK which lessens its impact.  Its ending loses focus, it runs out of puff.  Iris takes Simon back to five years before to show him a crucial example of where he keeps going wrong.  But Iris does this as if it’s a last resort.  If she could do it all along, why didn’t she? 

Formal structure would suggest that this flashback come in the middle (not a rule, just a suggestion) … and then Simon might learn what he needs to learn and act on it. 

But since the revealing flashback comes at the end, there’s no time for that.  Perhaps that’s in the nature of the case. Given the psychological problems the playwright gives his hero, what Simon learns is a bit obvious and thin – ‘You have to learn to love yourself before’, etc.  And so, the focus shifts entirely to Iris. Suddenly, she’s in a pool of light as if God has blessed her.  It’s the Iris Show.  It's her story.  She’s thrilled that she’s vindicated as a Good Bot, she’s succeeded.  Simon?  He’s left the stage.  What has been such lively, clever entertainment up to then doesn’t meet our expectations and SPARK falls just a little flat – but only at the end.

Michael Brindley  

Photographer: Hannah Jennings