Tom Green

The dialogue in Orphans by Dennis Kelly might be described as ultra-naturalistic. But, to me, it played as ultra-stylised. All those hesitations and false starts and repetitions and restatements as questions - I found it a barrier to my enjoyment of the play.

Why, it led me to wonder, did the Pinter dialogue in The Birthday Party (I recently saw the old BBC TV production) seem so much more real - even though the characters often say quite unlikely things?

Obviously we accept all sorts of 'unreal' things in any kind of fiction, so perhaps the whole notion of naturalistic or stylised is flawed. It's all stylised in one way or another.

The secret, I suppose, is for the dialogue and the characters to feel truthful. That's the magic connection (or not) between writer, performer and audience.

In The Author by Tim Crouch, I found that connection missing most of the time. I enjoyed it, and found it interesting, but was never fully involved. Perhaps that was the point. 

The previous plays of his that I've seen, and loved - My Arm and An Oak Tree - make various (apparent) attempts to create distance from the audience that in fact draw you in. Whereas in The Author the cast sit among the audience but I didn't feel close to them.

My favourite part was the character playing an audience member. His monologue at the start, "I love this. This is great. Isn't this great? etc", about being an audience member at the start of a play range completely true in a way that, for me, the rest didn't.