"Best of Five". Keble O'Reilly. Review by Sam Wagman

It’s the worldwide week of love and Oxford, however hard it may try to stymie the romance via essays and deadlines, is not immune. The high street restaurants are decked out in tables-for-two and carnations are briefly evading condemnation to a sad life wilting on a student’s lapel. Passion is in the air, across our streets, and on our screens. I’m sure many of you will have spent much of the week, like me, bingeing Netflix’s superb adaptation of One Day, tissues in one hand and Hinge in the other. In that same spirit, I hoped for a piece of theatre that would give voice to that magic or, at the very least, infuse St. Valentine’s Day with the sort of romantic ennui that makes it such timeless material.

Unfortunately, Pigeon Wings Productions’ Best of Five couldn’t quite lift itself over the lofty parapets of love and instead ended up a bumbling mess (not too dissimilar to myself, upon finishing Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall’s devastating performances in One Day). This production promised the world and ended up in its own small corner, patting itself on the back for a job badly done – maybe that sums up modern romance, but it’s bloody boring.

Best of Five follows the university life of Pip (Killian King) and his various romantic embarrassments on an exhaustingly hammered-home journey of self-discovery. The first thing to say about this play is that it’s unendingly confusing – I eventually found myself jotting down character names in the margins of my notebook in order to decipher the story. Characters are whisked away as quickly as they’re introduced and so little time and energy is devoted to allowing the production’s audience to gain solid purchase on what was being presented to them. For a play with a runtime exceeding two hours, I found it somewhat impressive that I left the Keble O’Reilly with little memory of anyone in it. Names and faces flew past with the emotional tenacity of an egg and cress sandwich; it’s a crying shame, given the talent of Best of Five’s writer, James Oakeshott, in constructing fleshed-out dialogue, that this play is stuffed with so many empty moments of filler.

Best of Five’s protagonist, Pip, dressed like the sort of self-congratulatory ‘digital nomad’ you might find in a musty Mediterranean hostel, is the only character afforded any development. But my word, if I was sat in the pub with him I’d bolt to the door. It’s obvious that Pip is meant to represent the every-student; scared, lost, and confronted by the lack of safety net that university life necessitates. He’s also into poetry (a plot point that felt bafflingly thumbed in) and spends much of the play asking us what it is he does “between the poems”. It’s a line so derivative it almost resembles an SNL skit, but with none of the crucial self-awareness.

From the get-go, Pip’s constant self-pity, self-centredness, and strangely misplaced smugness makes him abjectly unenjoyable to spend any time with. Unlikeable protagonists are not in and of themselves terrible things – the Roy family in Succession, Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, or Cate Blanchett’s recent outing as Lydia Tár – but Best of Five makes such little effort to confront the toxic behaviour of its central character. He’s presented as floppishly endearing and funny, a la Hugh Grant in Notting Hill, except I found myself wishing him off the stage. Killian King is clearly a strong actor, and he attempts to imbue Pip with a campness that elevates his latent narcissism into something more laughable, but the writing never materialises to back him up.

Tonally, Best of Five felt like several plays unsatisfactorily enmeshed into one. There’s an emotionally bereft sub-plot involving a younger Pips’s (Edgar Viola) relationship with his childhood sweetheart Josie (Rebecca Harper) that results in some truly bizarre time-warping scenes in which the two Pip’s communicate. What could have been a golden opportunity to explore the motivations behind Pip’s odd behaviour turns into a series of wooden interactions in which every individual appears to be speaking like a trained therapist. I’m sure there’s an audience for that form of comfort theatre in which characters enact idealistic conversations that we would all like to have with our friends and family; given Best of Five’s lousy character development, it all just felt unwarranted and ultimately, undeserved.

The presentation of Pip’s queerness was deftly done. Reminding me of a recent interview given by Andrew Scott in which he bemoaned patronizing descriptions of “openly gay men”, Pip’s queer identity is never overtly mentioned – queerness functions as a normalized feature of Best of Five’s world and was a greatly appreciated moment of theatrical escapism. More difficult to understand is why the female characters in this production were so shallowly conceived of; they operate as props for Pip’s egotism, used and discarded in comparison, for example, to his relationship with Oscar (Wally McCabe). Their motivations appear an afterthought, their feelings irrelevant, and their perspectives unrealised. In Best of Five, it’s Pip’s world, and we’re all sentenced to live in it.

There are flashes of real promise in Best of Five. Wally McCabe’s performance as the brooding and worldly barman Oscar (one of Pip’s love interests) is genuinely fantastic and somewhat reminiscent of Tom Cruise in 1988’s Cocktail (despite the film, that is high praise, I promise). McCabe’s Oscar is one of only a handful of characters given space and time to develop a distinct persona and it’s a performance hoisted by brilliantly facetious grins and knowing glances. Alex Evers’ outing as Dylan, the crewdating jock of the piece, is a light and very funny take on the posho rower that punctured the rather gloomy Pip sequences; the set decoration for Dylan’s room by Hannah Wei deserves its own round of applause for the mess of dirty socks and strewn underwear. Special mention must also go to Rebecca Harper and Edgar Viola’s wonderfully random dance scene at the beginning of the second act. It was an odd aside, but nonetheless appreciated for the rare stylistic flourish in a production sorely lacking in vision.

Best of Five ends with a reading of one of Pip’s much-mythologized poems. It’s an earnest end to a play that lacked any semblance of coherence or brevity. However, in the spirit of this season of love and inspired by Pip’s poetry, I thought I would leave you with a favourite love poem of mine, composed by the aptly named late Jean Valentine:

For love

you leapt sometimes
you walked away sometimes

that time on the phone you
couldn’t get your breath
I leapt but couldn’t get to you

I caught the brow that bid the dead
I caught the bough that hid

I’m, you know, still here,
tulip, resin, temporary—