"Are You Sure?" Burton Taylor Studio. Review by Victoria Tayler

How long is a piece of string? Growing up, my Dad would ask me that all the time, a casual riddle in answer to anything asked too earnestly or too impatiently. “How long till we’re there, Dad?” “How long is a piece of string?” Witty, if a little maddening, definitely watered down by the frequency with which he said it. I think he mainly pursued that line of enquiry for the 10 minutes of peace it afforded him while I pondered the impossible question. Impossible questions (and pondering) is also the name of the game for Deja Vu Productions’ newest show, as one may guess from its provocative, rhetorical title: “Are You Sure?”

Penned by writer-director-actor F.C. Zeri, “Are You Sure?” struck a chord with me, obsessed as it is with similar imagery: string, fathers, unanswerable questions. Although here we are not preoccupied so much with the length of a piece of string as we are with cutting it (in half, and in half, and in half again), the puzzle is the same. The answer is either infinitely small, or infinitely big, but nonetheless, infinite.  

Infinity is the troublesome word here, the theme around which the play revolves. The play begins with a notion of direction, but is quickly sidelined, as  Zeri’s intended monologue about their life flies out of the window, replaced by an accidental, cuttingly honest monologue about their fears and anxieties. The source of those anxieties is the myriad paths offered by life (infinite possibilities!) and the crushing reality that those potential lives recede and die out, a la Sylvia Plath’s fig tree. Our protagonist can’t decide what to do with their life, and they are stuck in the self-centred, but nonetheless agonising torment of watching the days go by in a state of decision-phobic paralysis. Which of course, is, uh, the only part of this play that I found to be unrelatable.

Our lead (Zeri themself) is lovable, neurotic, familiar. Accompanying our protagonist’s monologue are witty interjections by ‘copy one’ (Ruby Wallace) and ‘copy two’ (Lucas Goddard), angel and devil type characters. Copy one seems to represent the voice of Generalised Anxiety Disorder, whilst copy two embodies a forced ‘Just Do It’ kind of mentality, which is equally unproductive for our indecisive lead. Both play their respective roles very well, winning well deserved laughs. There are subtle, usually visual, jokes sprinkled here and there which I assumed were carefully scripted, but these turned out to be improvised: a real credit to the actors.  

There’s a definite joy and contingency in the writing here, which feels perpetually on the brink of opening up in a thousand ways. As Zeri admits in their opening scene, in a sort of meta commentary, it’s ‘ex-peri-mental theatre,’ and it possesses the energy you’d want from that endeavour. At one point they hand out Zeri’s real translations of a Horace poem to the audience, cut the lights so that you can’t read it, and then perform the reading under spotlight, before riffing on the ethical horrors of loving classical poetry (“colonialism!”). The copies have fun drawing random (sometimes phallic) items on the board. And in the final scene, our lead simply… leaves? Whilst the slightly frantic ‘copies’ and the father look at each other blankly, our protagonist is out of bounds. The imagery unravels out and out, and you could think with this play for a long time, eking different messages out of its various themes.  

I can’t say I was convinced by the resolution of the play, perhaps because I feel the anxiety of too many options so acutely, or perhaps because the resolution arrives in the form of a maths equation (“the answer is one!”). As our lead illustrates this, it seems they are also supposed to come to terms with disappointing their father, embracing the passage of time, the impossibility of achieving everything, and so on. But the emotional resolution never really arrived for me. The carefully built up layers of anxiety were not peeled back with the same sophistication and resolve with which they were constructed. Which may be an unfair thing to ask a fellow 22 year old writer to do, but does subtract (ha) a little from the experience.

One cannot escape the sense that the problems highlighted in the play lack in depth, and this is highlighted, rather than offset, by self-aware allusions to the audience’s investment of time (including some clever riffs on an hour feeling infinite) and the triviality of the protagonist’s worries in comparison to the woes of the world (economic instability, hunger, war). These self aware quips lack the resonance to feel genuine and fail to rescue the play from feeling a bit pretentious.  

Still, it’s a hard task. This play reminded me in some ways of Oisin Byrne’s ‘Unprofessional,’ which was staged in the BT last Hilary, complete with audience participation, fourth wall breaks, relentless undercutting of overly pompous lines. That production did a great job at skirting pretentious allegations, but perhaps to the extent of compromising on some of its main themes, as the play dissolved into self-referential parody. It’s irony poisoning to some degree, because producing something autobiographical and sincere feels so taboo now. I respect that “Are You Sure?” refuses to abandon the gravity of its themes or back down from the toughness of the assignment. And I hope Oxford’s writers will keep attempting to answer such questions. Maybe we’ll find a happy middle. I’m kind of desperate for it.