“A show bursting at the seams with drama, sturm, und drang.”
Editorial Rating:5 Stars (Outstanding)
Effortless takes effort. If art is anything it is the ability to make a thing look natural that isn’t. Perhaps the most annoying thing about Olympians is their total lack of puffed outness at the end of the race. I want them to look how I feel after encountering any sort of gradient after months spent trotting around the falter-than-flat Cambridgeshire fens. Instead, they have all this… what’s the word… composure. Learning to go through life composed is one of the hardest things to achieve and, like so many things in the age of viral rage, composure is in short supply.
For centuries, those with the means taught their offspring the art of ‘composed’ by shipping them off to boarding school where the routines and regime could (not so gently) bash them into a composed shape. James Bond’s sang-froid is the intentional product of this system. Problem. It turns out that most little human beings don’t like being separated from their parents and that placing very young children into institutions can do more harm than good.
We enter to find little Tom Greaves prepping for his first day at boarding school. It’s a big deal that he’s going. It’s a massive point of self-identity and pride for Pater Greaves that his progeny can take the toll road less travelled and start off several runs up the social ladder from the kids little Tom is currently spending his carefree days with. But there is trouble in paradise. Little Tom can see, even if he cannot yet fully understand, that his parents are deeply, irreconcilably unhappy with each other. As will become painfully clear during the subsequent stage traffic, adult Tom’s world is as unstable as a top-heavy very unstable thing and no amount of front, bluster, laddish banter, and emotional disconnection can compensate. As becomes painfully clear, the early death of innocence does not have a happy afterlife. The very things that were obtained at so great a cost are anchoring poor Tom to the storm where he must now suffer for our amusement.
Effortless takes effort and it would take a lot of effort to unpack all the stagecraft, all the tricks of the trade, all the raw energy that has gone into this super powerful and super memorable production. This is a show bursting at the seams with drama, sturm, und drang. This is storytelling at its most profound. This is a dark comedy for people who like to see society’s imagined social betters falling apart and failing, flailing at life. This is a production for people who like their theatre chaotic and spontaneous yet also techie and on-target.
Come for the comedy-drama. Stay for the mayhem. Leave with a revitalised sense of what real living theatre can make happen. Get your smart new uniform coats on and go see this!
Get Your Coats On 
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