Absurdism is hard.

To rephrase, absurdism is a hard style for a playwright to tap into, let alone tap into effectively, and it’s an even harder style for an audience to engage with. When it’s done well, it can be the funniest thing you’ve ever seen. Seeing a Eugene Ionesco play done right is one of the most profound experiences I’ve had in a theatre. It brings attention to the potential pointlessness of our existence, the lack of logic in most human interaction and how ridiculous most social conventions are. However, when it doesn’t hit the mark, absurdism can come off feeling like lacklustre naturalism. Characters with monologues about the pointlessness of existence sound like creations from minor Woody Allen films, circular conversations sound like lazy writing and simple character beats come off like clunky writing.

It’s a style that takes a tremendous skill and even more importantly, clarity of voice to pull off. The playwright needs to know what exactly they’re saying, why they’re using this particular style to say it, and what they’re trying to communicate to the audience. Otherwise, it’s an hour of characters looking for an arc and jokes looking for a play. Even if all of this is done right, if the production doesn’t fall in line with exactly what the play is trying to communicate, the entire enterprise falls down. It doesn’t help that absurdism is a genre that sets out to discuss and interrogate the meaningless of human existence, an endeavour that all too easily sets a writer up for failure.

Where Ushers fails is this lack of clarity. The situation and context is simple; ushers go about their job, or not, outside a theatre. They angst, they make jokes and they talk about things that people in their early to mid twenties talk about. What is never made clear is why they’re doing this or why we’re watching it. Finnius Teppett’s script is littered with jokes, many of them legitimately funny, but it feels inessential. The plot shudders from point A to point B after a long series of elliptical conversations, the characters don’t go through any significant or believable arcs and there is little weight to any of the events. It’s a difficult script to work with, and it’s not promising that the play is most effective when it ditches absurdism and goes for naturalism, and the issues of the production largely stem from the text.

If the cast and design elements were united around a singular style and tone, Ushers could’ve worked as a comedy, albeit a ridiculous and fairly unbelievable one. However, Romain Mereau’s direction leaves both performers and designers sitting in entirely different creative spaces, sometimes even literally, with the final image of the show being lost to over half the audience because of unclear blocking. Christine Urquhart’s set is genuinely brilliant; her theatre foyer looks like MC Escher if he designed Event Cinemas, and is the one element that speaks to a true understanding of the genre.

None of the performers truly flounder: everybody has more-than-decent comic timing and are charismatic enough to keep the audience engaged, but even the two highlights of the cast are emblematic of the confused approach to the production. Jess Holly Bates is flat-out the best thing about the play - she simply exists harder onstage than any body or any thing - and she hammers the punchlines home like a stand-up who has been telling these jokes her whole life. She even takes the script’s most dire moment, a troubling and frankly sexist moment that requires her to strip down, and grounds it in something human.

The other highlight is Hamish Parkinson, giving a performance similar to if Bjork was cast in Mommie Dearest. It is a truly bizarre and high-wire piece of acting, the only other thing in the play that hints at what genre it is stabbing at, and he is the most compelling thing onstage whenever he’s there. The coda of the play, unnecessary and strangely unfunny, only works as much as it does because Parkinson commits to it.

These performances, both genuinely great and almost worth the price of admission, feel jarring in the same play, like how much of Ushers feels jarring. From the design to the characters to even the jokes, it feels like parts of other plays and styles put together into one script. There is something admirable about the production, it is a brave thing to do something different and even moreso to do something different that is difficult, but it’s hard to admire a production that leaves you feeling as empty as Ushers does.

Ushers plays at the Basement Theatre
from Tuesday 24 March - Saturday 28 March