In the end, perhaps the most important thing to note about Jamie Patton’s Anderman is its ambition—and, it should be said now, its failure to fail completely in bringing off everything it so very, very clearly tried to do.  Structurally sophisticated, it took onto itself a variety of ‘big ideas’, each flagged up with clarity at one point or another—the theme of goodness vs. greatness; the theme of timelessness of art vs. the transience of life; the uselessness of words; there was even a bit in the church at the end which screamed out to be ‘noticed pointedly’.

It faced, head on, a notoriously difficult authorial question—when your protagonist is an artistic genius, do you allow your audience a sample of his work?  It will feel like cheating not to; but a death-toll is sounded the moment it looks like anything other than the work of a genius.  So, that we should have been bombarded at every turn by Joseph Anderman’s mediocre musicry felt, like everything in the play, overtly self-knowing.  Were we merely supposed to ‘understand’ these compositions to be, in fact, great—just as, on the stage, we understand a curtain to be a door?  Or were we supposed to question the authority of everyone who kept saying ‘genius’?

I feel if I knew this I’d know, really, where the play was coming from.  That I didn’t is evidently testament to the play’s complexity.  But it also contrasted violently with the excessive lack of subtlety which kept constantly rearing up.  This was mostly localised in the wrenching character of Julia, who came across as a kooky Hoxton incarnation of that flat cipher of womanhood which has stood at the centre of man-made art since the Fall, gazed at and destroyed by her author, who feels that as long as she looks interesting she’ll be interesting.  But then, since Anderman himself treats her in just this way, perhaps she is supposed to be.

I had constantly to ask myself this sort of question, a question made all the more cloudy for the thick layers of self-awareness heaped everywhere.  For every piece of high-fallutin’ ‘poetic language’ spoken by Joseph or poet Tom there was a self-deprecating duff reaction which read like a sign which should have been pasted above the stage: ‘NOT REALLY PRETENTIOUS’.  The obverse of this was the multiplicity of honking clichés in which the play’s language was seeped (‘Nothing left to live for’; ‘she takes my breath away’; ‘knight in shining armour’).

Clearly, this was not an unintentional device, and undoubtedly was making some point or other about the futility of language.  And yet I had a feeling throughout that, somewhere, Patton may have lost his grip on his own irony.  Cliché settled comfortably into the performance as a whole, consolidating the curious tensions between the ambiguously complex and the excruciatingly blatant.