Tape | Theatre | The Guardian
Theatre This article is more than 20 years oldReviewTape
This article is more than 20 years oldSoho Theatre, LondonThe Soho has a fondness for noisily visceral American plays that produce more heat than light. After Wesley Moore's A Reckoning we now have Stephen Belber's 75-minute Tape, which has already been filmed and which doesn't so much deal with as dance around such big subjects as date-rape, retrospective guilt and the relativity of truth.
Belber's setting is a Michigan motel room where two high-school friends are uneasily reunited. Vin, a Californian drug dealer and voluntary fireman, is the one who failed to make it; Jon, an indie film-maker awaiting the local showing of his first feature, is ambitious and socially concerned. Vin uses their testy encounter to accuse Jon of date-raping their old high-school flame, Amy, 10 years ago. And when Amy, who just happens to be the local assistant district attorney, shows up, the stage is set for a guilt-ridden postmortem.
Clearly Belber has studied his Pirandello, Pinter and Mamet: the elusiveness of truth, the enigmatic nature of the female psyche, the male macho bluster remind us of countless other plays. But, while Belber knows how to screw up the theatrical tension, he puts surface excitement before psychological exploration. He sidesteps the homosexual implications of Vin's peculiar obsession with his friend's bedroom behaviour. And he skips quickly over the play's biggest social issue: that there is no statute of limitations on sexual misconduct felony, which presumably means Americans can go to their graves haunted by adolescent misdeeds.
Much as I admire the new theatrical economy, I also feel a lot of American drama suffers from a telescoped urgency. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives. Now there are no second acts in American plays either, which means that writers, as here, manipulate character for the sake of wham-bam emotional confrontations. Belber's all-American cast do a fine job, with Dominic Fumusa as the flaky Vin, Josh Stamberg as the guilt-ridden Jon and Alison West as the hypotenuse in this emotional triangle all punching their weight in Geoffrey Nauffts's production. But the only moral I deduced from this hectically excitable play is summed up by a catchy number from Frank Loesser's Where's Charley?: once in love with Amy, always in love with Amy.
· Until August 30. Box office: 020-7478 0100.
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