Play: Wish List* by Katherine Soper at the Royal Court Upstairs

The Royal Court

* Not to be confused with either of the two Hollywood romcoms with similar titles. There's a pretty good chance that, if you liked them, you won't like this.

Joseph Quinn and Erin Doherty

I cannot commend this highly enough. Affecting, involving, authentic. The script (Katherine Soper's debut, it won the 2015 Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting), the playing, are so close to real life, that you don’t feel like you’re watching someone act at all, you feel like you’re watching someone be. The dialogue has all the cadences of natural speech. There’s no staginess, no showpiece monologues, no extra words, unlike The Pitchfork Disney, which I saw a couple of nights before, a play that touches on similar subjects (brother/sister dynamic, [co-]dependence, mental health problems) but is an actorly piece using shock tactics (and admittedly some humour and sexual innuendo), requiring the actors to deliver lengthy monologues to express their strange foibles and predilections. Wish List shocks profoundly, simply, without verbose explanations.

Dead ordinary and all the better for it

Tamsin is a whole character (a person not an ideal or a symbol). She’s painfully real, not given to any particular eloquence, which is not so say that there’s nothing eloquent in the play. The entirety of the play – the performances, writing, staging – add up to an everyday eloquence.  Her battle with the benefits system on behalf of a brother who's practically house-bound by severe OCD is familiar to any of us who've ever had to wrangle with the bureaucracy of any imperfect system, whether it's a hospital, a council or simply Southeastern's Delay/Repay form. We rail at the hoops we have to jump through. Tamsin is heart-breakingly disappointed by her brother’s failures to help himself (and so the both of them) but ultimately reacts with patience and tolerance (greeted by the exasperated sighs of the ladies near us in the audience) in the face of each setback.

Playwright Katherine Soper

Fresh, intimate, personal but also universal. In fact, there's a theory that the more personal something is the more universal it is. Tamsin’s dilemma is conveyed brilliantly. The Meatloaf sequence is exquisite, touching, amusing, embarrassing, ultimately uplifting, a beautifully underplayed tour de force from Erin Doherty. She holds this together, her frustration articulated in a confused pause, an excited rush of words, a defeated glance.

Kudos to the rest of the cast who are all superb: Shaquille Ali-Yebuah, Aleksandar Mikic and Joseph Quinn, the last of whom I've since seen in Dickensian (London Live) as Arthur Havisham. He is somehow able to make this essentially weak and wrong man sympathetic even as we decry his sly machinations.

And of course, Erin Doherty has gone onto TV success as Becky in Chloe.

I sometimes leave the theatre feeling a little cheated, feeling that the actors did their best with a substandard script. Not so with Wish List. It’s the real deal. Even better than Rachel De-lahay's The Westbridge. The writing is tremendous. If you only see one play this year, see this one.  If you only ever see one play, see this one. And go listen to 'I Would Do Anything for Love'. Right now.