"Thamesis". BT Studio

This review was written for Daily Information, and appears on their website.

Nathaniel Jones scurries on to the Burton Taylor stage, arms full of battery-operated candles and bits of script which he drops as he goes, and nervously tries to arrange his tiny collection of props into something resembling a set while gulping anxiously at the audience and asking Evie the technician to turn the lights up.

It’s an act. He knows it. We know it.

We know it because he tells us that today is Midsummer (it’s actually February), and with that one statement it’s clear that we are watching a play, and not a piece of live stand-up. This is the sort of confident, clever, light-touch audience manipulation that marks out Thamesis as something a bit special.

Last week Leah Aspden was acting in the disarmingly fourth-wall-breaking Every Brilliant Thing. Now she’s back directing Thamesis, and it’s another play that tickles and tugs at the boundary between performance and confession. Written and performed as a solo piece by Nathaniel Jones, it’s a beautiful and thought-provoking experience. Granted, it’s also pretty confusing – but satisfyingly so. I sat and wondered what the link was exactly between pagan rituals, coming of age as a gay man, and losing control of your technical equipment during a play. I may not have the answers, but I enjoyed the questions, and the skill of Jones’s presentation and writing meant that the issues he was addressing were always fascinating without offering simple solutions.

The performance is punctuated with haunting, pagan songs invoking ancient river gods, tales of being abducted by the ‘Fay’, intermingled with memories of first love and buried trauma. But during the show strange things start to happen that look like genuine accidents: lights flashing on and off at the wrong time; sound effects appearing where they’re not supposed to be. It’s as if the machinery of theatre, the bits and pieces of his creation, are rising up like modernised gods from the deep to force the performer to confront the truth about his own past. And his fervour for paganism makes sense when he tells us that the non-pagan world only made gay marriage legal ten years ago. It’s true that the Christian tradition has hardly been welcoming of homosexuality over most of the last two thousand years. Green Men and Fairies glory in sexual diversity.

Nathaniel Jones himself is an irresistibly appealing stage presence. With his scruffy beard, twinkling eyes, and gently importunate campery that bespeaks years of not wanting to reveal too much, he’s someone you just want to listen to. And his play is like the offspring of an LGBTQ+ teen graphic novel and Swamp Thing. Britannia meets Heartstopper perhaps. Things don’t have to be explicable – even to the artist – but they do have to make cohesive sense. And Thamesis finds that mysterious path through the woods with panache.

I spoke to director Leah Aspden briefly after the show, and she cheerfully admitted, “Even I’m not sure what’s going on in it, and I directed it.” As a definition of art, that’ll do for me.