Box Clever

Box Clever is a show of two frustratingly different, disparate halves.

On one hand, new-writing theatre company Nabokov's latest show, by associate playwright Monsay Whitney, is a funny, painful story of being chewed up and spat out by a social care system masked in the language of concern, but which is really only interested in protecting itself.

Whitney plays a single mother who, after leaving her abusive boyfriend, ends up in a women's refuge with her four-year-old daughter. Whitney has an ear for the telling details that make up a life. Her character is funny, skeptical and ringingly true. And her horror and anger when she discovers that this supposed place of safety has been anything but for her child burns off the Roundabout stage.

But then there is the clown. Played by singer-songwriter Avi Simmons wearing a red nose, she shadows Whitney, stands in for other characters, lets toy mice roam, accompanies her on the guitar and occasionally air boxes. Her presence in director Stef O'Driscoll's production is an act of self-sabotage. As an absurdist representation of Whitney's battles, she's superfluous at best, actively irritating at worst. 

It's incredibly frustrating to watch two sides of a production working at such odds to each other – to see the power and eloquence of the story at Box Clever's heart consistently being drowned out by the conceptual equivalent of a slowly deflating whoopee cushion. As a theatrical device, it kicks away the legs of the show.   It's no joke.