Blackout Songs at the Hampstead Theatre

Last Updated on December 12, 2024

A Main House Return for Award-Nominated Blackout Songs 

After a sold-out run at the Hampstead Theatre Downstairs and an Olivier Award nomination, Blackout Songs returns for a run in the Main House.

Blackout Songs is a carefully constructed jigsaw puzzle depicting the dangers of alcoholism and co-dependency. It provides the audience with multiple versions of the same events, half-remembered (or fully confabulated) stories, and narratives that end where they began. Pieced together with fragments of broken lives, Joe White’s Olivier award-nominated play is a sobering reminder that alcoholism’s most terrifying effect is the victim’s failure to keep track of reality. The audience is left to wonder what is real and what is imaginary, or whether reality has dissolved altogether like an ice cube in a gin and tonic.

With a two-person cast and the plot revolving around a claustrophobic romance, it does feel like Blackout Songs was written for the Hampstead Theatre’s smaller space downstairs, where it premiered. Moved to the Main House, the play loses some of its intensity. When the characters hug opposite walls, the stage feels too empty, and the production struggles to justify its 90-minute running time without an interval. However, the move upstairs is merited by the performances of Alex Austin and Rebecca Humphries, whose visceral, tragicomic acting provides laughter, shock, and more than a few quivering lips. Humphries is particularly good, her comic timing and light-heartedness making her dark, destructive dependency even more heart-rending.

Their performances are made especially impressive by the fact that the script gives little away about their lives – their backgrounds are confined to a few lines here and there, and the audience never quite knows whether they are truths or confabulations. Almost everything we know about the characters is revealed in the way they move, the looks they give each other, and the ways they express their affection. They crawl and slither around the stage, physically and mentally intertwined, ensnared in the web of their mutual self-destruction.

Every time the audience is about to witness the emergence of a cohesive picture of the characters, they are soaked in booze, and the picture falls to pieces once again.

This ability to pull the audience in at the right moments – to provide enough light to see the edges of something important – before taking it all away is what makes White’s script compelling. Guy Jones’ direction and Christopher Nairne’s lighting design, which literally blacks out the stage at these pivotal moments, capture the sense of disorientation that keeps dragging us back and forth between compassion and frustration, clarity and distortion, fiction and reality.

It is also what should keep pulling in audiences for Hampstead Theatre’s latest innovative drama. Blackout Songs is a masterful exposition of co-dependent relationships and provide a stark reminder – if one needed it – of the precious sharpness of sobriety. I’ll be sticking to non-alcoholic beers for a while.

Blackout Songs at the Hampstead Theatre runs until 6th May 2023. Buy tickets here.

HAMPSTEAD THEATRE,
ETON AVENUE, SWISS COTTAGE,
LONDON, NW3 3EU