Theatre review: For the Grace of You Go I

Welsh playwright Alan Harris’s tragicomedy takes an inventive and humane look at the pressures faced by people being levered out of the social welfare system.

Jim (played by James Smithers) has mental health issues that have kept him out of workforce and on disability benefits for a few years. He’s recently acquired a new case manager in Irina (Jane Angharad), whose job it is to coax him into full-time work. Irina is very firmly of the opinion that a production line job in an artisanal pizza factory (where he will provide the hands to allow the pizza to qualify as ‘handmade’) will be Jim’s pathway to productivity.

Jim goes along for the ride but he’s a long way from the ideal employee. Slow and dreamy, he likes to arrange slices of pepperoni into poignant slogans such as ‘If Not Now Then When?’ The boss is not happy.

Jim is also a film fan, a regular at a movie night for people with mental health challenges. There he meets Mark (Shan-Re Tan), a freelance writer for military-themed websites. He also happens to be Irina’s partner. 

Confident and smart, Mark seems very together, but he has issues, too, in part caused by what he sees as a new and unsatisfactory life. Coming off his meds isn’t helping. 

The deadpan films of Finnish director Aki Kaurasmäki are popular among this cinephile clique and one of them, 1990’s I Hired a Contract Killer, lodges in Jim’s mind as a way out of his predicament. All he has to do is persuade an increasingly unstable Mark to play his part.

Directed by Lucy Clements and co-produced by New Ghosts Theatre Company and Secret House, this staging deftly navigates Harris’s shifts between Jim’s inner and outer worlds, from the everyday to the surreal. 

The set – a green screen cyclorama – suggests a world on which just about anything might be projected. Video cameras give us an impactful sense of the nature of Jim’s dissociative disorder, one in which he sees himself as both director and performer of the movie of his own existence.

An arrangement of working conveyor belts represents the pizza factory and the monotony of the daily grind Jim is being bullied into. Projected scenes from I Hired a Contract Killer flag the slow dissolve of the film into Jim’s life, which is later underlined in a dumbshow of parallel physical action.

Smithers is excellent as Jim, nimble, messy, likable and, at his core, quite desperate. Angharad gives us a gratingly perky Irina. ‘Work will make you free’, she blithely assures Jim, without a clue as to where the phrase originated. She’s no cardboard cut-out though and Angharad keeps us in touch with her terror of failure. Shan-Re Tan brings energy and a touch of movie star charisma to the role of Mark.

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Harris has a playful touch but his concerns are serious and real. The play’s veerings can shake your attention lose at times but the moral shabbiness of post-Brexit Britain is sharply captured and resonant for Australian audiences.

For the Grace of You Go I
Kings Cross Theatre
Presented by Secret House & New Ghosts Theatre Company
Director: Lucy Clements
Set Designers: Monique Langford & Kate Ingram 
Technical Director: Alex Holver 
Tech Design: Kate Ingram 
Lighting Design: Alice Stafford 
Sound Design: Sam Cheng 
Costume Design: Monique Langford and& Aloma Barnes 

For the Grace of You Go I will be performed until 15 October 2022.