"Daddy Longlegs". Pilch. Review by Sam Wagman

How is it that we touch the sublime? Our half-baked understanding of mortality and holiness prohibits us from any meaningful engagement or co-existence with it. We are condemned, eternally, to brief grazes with transcendence; a song lyric, a lookout-point, or, indeed, a play. This week, the Michael Pilch Studio has been the centre of a theatrical reckoning of biblical proportions. Stepping out, after the lights went up, into the heavy rain of Saturday night felt akin to phasing out of an encounter with the divine – Matchbox Productions’ Daddy Longlegs is a true triumph. This show represents the pinnacle of Oxford theatre; daring, bold, and engaged. A production scraping the cosmos that lands its audience, with a humbling thump, back in a world riddled with the same broken people that fill its stage. It’s simply magnificent.

Following an anonymized priest’s (Will Shackleton) vicarious interactions through the netting of a confession box and the taped-up edges of a glory hole, Daddy Longlegs is a sanctified meditation on the uselessness of any and all interactions or people and the dumbfounded desire to attempt purchase on anything and anyone beside ourselves. Shackleton’s ‘Priest’ drunkenly shouts at schoolboys, sasses teenage girls, and regales fathers with the knowledge that their children think they’re “boring c*nts”. There are pieces of drama which flail at the prospect of approaching even half the scope of Daddy Longlegs’ swift 90 minutes. Alec Tiffou’s script is an extraordinary demonstration of talent – as the lights turned on, I turned to a friend and asked who wrote the play. I expected him to respond with one of the greats – surely, this came from Pinter or Butterworth. He just pointed across the room. Tiffou has announced himself at the forefront of an Oxford writing scene I was recently bemoaning; I found myself in awe of the dexterity with which he wields both character and theme in one fell swoop. Not one line flounders, nor does one single character feel out of place or underwritten. This is, without a doubt, the most profound piece of theatre I have seen in my three years here. At one point, during a particularly vivacious interaction between the priest and a schoolboy (Juliette Imbert), our central pious figure exclaims: “My job is not to forgive sin, it is to hoard it.” Alec Tiffou, I have only one word for you: Bravo.

Daddy Longlegs is anchored by masterful directorial strokes from Joe Rachman and Tiffou himself. The decision to have a revolving circular stage – on one side, the confessional boxes and on the other, the toilet cubicles either side of the glory hole – is inspired. Tiffou and Rachman are directors in reflective conversation with the former’s work; Daddy Longlegs is a play of reverberation and echo. The glory hole, so obviously symbolic of lust and base desire, paired with the sanctity of the confessionary space occupy a solitary area of the audience’s mind. The moral gap between them turns and turns and turns with the stage until they are practically indistinguishable. There is a blatent irreverence at the core of Daddy Longlegs but one which turns up such delicious morsels for both performer and audience contemplation and blurs those lines endlessly. The piece’s central character is abjectly disturbed via his relationship with his mother (Vita Hamilton) and has formed para-social relationships with everyone from a toilet-based prostitute (George Vyvyan) to Call Her Daddy’s Alexandra Cooper. These are the necessary facades the Priest has constructed to distract from his latent emotional parasitism – Rachman and Tiffou might as well have just strung up a large mirror to its audience. As the Priest judges his flock, so do we and, as we sympathize with him, we are forced to imagine the boundaries of our own facile defences.

Will Shackleton’s performance in Daddy Longlegs is singular – this is a star-making turn that cements Shackleton as one of the very best in his cohort. On stage for the entirety of the production’s runtime, it feels close to impossible to describe his work with the justice that it deserves. Shackleton’s performance is one of continual transformation; there’s a sadness to his character, played with such remarkable feeling, alongside a bubbling yearning for interaction. In a world with no Tesco cashiers and automated ticket gates in train stations, this Priest is merely attempting a semblance of human interaction in-between the gaps of our individual cut-off boxes. The closing scene of Daddy Longlegs, in which Shackleton’s Priest is unclothed by his mother to the haunting melody of Bob Dylan’s All the Tired Horses is, unquestionably, one of the greatest acting performances I’ve ever witnessed. His face, caked in tears, transfigures into a celestial plane against which we confront ourselves, our faith, and our dependency on accumulating other people’s trauma. Shackleton reaches out, as Adam does to God himself, and brushes his fingers against the heavens. His audience, captured in the same voyeuristic space as those on stage, can only sit back and watch as an actor ascends to the apex of his art.

Matchbox Productions has similarly fortified its place in the halls of OUDS history. This is a company that has produced some of the most technically proficient and experimental pieces of theatre in recent memory; Love & Money, The Metamorphosis, and Milked have gradually confirmed Matchbox as a place for bold and brilliant creative choices. Daddy Longlegs denotes the culmination of this work – the subtlety of Tilly Dyson’s original score (aptly reminiscent of Madvillain’s Accordion) coupled with Orli Wilkins’ similarly incisive lighting work made for another seamless performance. The supporting cast were no less audacious. Juliette Imbert, channelling something of a foetal Harry Potter, is haunting as another example of the Priest’s desperate projection onto the fleeting figures around him. Susie Weidmann’s performance as Alice, a troubled teenager confronting the perennial problem of getting acne during cunnilingus, is as humorous as it is despondent. That dual status - characters couched between laughter and tears - imbues the rest of Daddy Longlegs’ supporting cast: George Vyvyan, Lucas Ipkendanz, and Vita Hamilton rounded out the production with tethered and confident outings.

Yet these individuals, fleshed out as they are by Tiffou’s dazzling script, all pale in comparison to the piece’s commanding leading man. Shackleton fills the stage with every hiss and tear and whimper; his supporting cast mirroring his own salacious hoarding of sin. At the close of Daddy Longlegs, Shackleton stands almost naked, bathed in sumptuous red light, having unsuccessfully fought against his own inevitable regression of the self. In this moment, audience and performer become locked in the tightest of stares, floating together above and beyond the muddied Pilch floors. This is the power of theatre, manifested in the elevation of despair and fear into something eminently more beautiful, something frighteningly more raw. Something touching sublime.