Play Review: Lies

Play Review: Lies

A play clouded in mystery, Lies, directed by Alexander Devriendt discreetly draws people to visit their production at the Almeida Theatre. Where once entering the theatre, you find no signs of what awaits. The play follows a completely different format to what one would be used to in attending a play. Requiring audience interaction, where the audience members are the players within the production. The doors open and as you walk into the space you notice multiple tables on all sides of the room and chairs surrounding them. Someone greets you as you enter and separates each person to a table, equally dispersing the crowds. You sit at your assigned table and are welcomed by a person sitting behind the table.

The “actors” within the play do well to create an atmosphere of anxiety, how they separate you from your own party, to place you along with strangers. The room itself is cloaked in darkness with little to dim lighting this being the only source of light. The lighting and set up of the tables along with the actor’s costumes, gave one the sense of entering a private casino. The actors greeting you as you sit at the table, dressed in all black, resembling the dealers sitting at a card table. Lighting was used to express and stress the atmosphere of certain situations. Drawing attention to certain things they would put a spotlight into the center of the room making one focus on the spinning chalk board in the middle of the room, containing all the important information. Music also seemed to be subtly important staging, where as the situations got more tense the instrumental techno also seemed to get more tense, loud, and fast, but when things were being drawn back to individual tables the music slowed down and got quieter. To draw individual attention, they would strike a gong, mimicking a bell that quickly made everyone turn to the center, by the end of the night one will be conditioned to focus at the center at the bang of the gong. 

The play focused on human reaction and behavior. The “dealers” in charge of each table kept tabs and record of what was happening within each table, but most of the decisions made by each table were purely based on the player at the tables, choices made had to reached in agreement. The “dealers” gave players the choice of what should happen next, even though there were rules to still be followed within the little community that had been created. Many of the choices effected everyone, but it became obvious that the choices began to effect the table as a community. The people who were not dealers, but banged the gong, roamed around the room collecting data and would inform the room of the circumstances about each table. They would report on how the actions and environment within the room was changing in certain terms such as; changing room temperature. This provided one with the sense of a social experiment where these actors put random people into a room, set some ground rules, and then let the experiment begin focusing on how the outcomes reached by individuals stimulated the overall environment of the room.  

The production did an amazing job at expressing in an interesting way what it means as individuals to be part of the world economy. In the bigger concept of the production, banking and world economics were the focus of the props and set up of the play. Asking audiences to notice how much each person relies on other companies within their communities, but also how these communities rely on outside aid and help as well. It was fascinating how this production interpreted this big economic issue, but it made it fun and relevant to things we see in our own economies at this moment in time. Leaving the play, you realize how everything was just a game and the stakes and risks were not real, but when you continue to think and talk about your experience you begin to realize how important this production was with telling the story of economy on the level of a world stage.