A choice between Beige and Grey: this is the key conflict that spurs the island of Bulwick into action in Joe McGuchan’s new play, Beige. Norman Beige (Thomas Warwick) is running to lead the island against Madeleine Grey (Amaya Holman), but, as we might expect from a show that describes itself as “absurd, nihilistic and hilarious”, it doesn’t all go quite to plan. One of the joys of student writing is having no idea what will happen when you enter a theatre, so going on these words alone I sat down and took in the show. At the end, I agreed with two of three points: absurd and nihilistic the show most certainly is, but sadly it never quite reaches the heights of hilarious.

The show follows Beige on his campaign, though it is established rather early on that, despite his wife/ campaign manager’s insistence on victory, he doesn’t want to win. While Warwick performs this internal conflict brilliantly (if a little quietly), the role does feel somewhat out of place in a show purporting to be a comedy. Throughout I felt genuinely sorry for him and the position he was in, which meant I didn’t really end up laughing at anything in which he was involved. At times, Beige had lines seemingly designed to tell us that certain moments were ridiculous, which felt cumbersome and unnecessary. 

The other characters were more often the comedic highlights – watching Ed Bankes and Freya Ingram’s various islanders grill Beige in the town debate or give increasingly horrible job interviews to town cartoonist Ann (Chloe Lansley) really brought up the energy of the show with the snappy pace and strong comedic performances. Holman, too, brought some of the biggest laughs of the night with her rendition of Taylor Swift’s ‘Shake It Off’, changed here to a funeral dirge. Simply refocus some of this comedy into the character we spend the most time with and the show would be much more enjoyable . As it is, being left alone with Beige, despite Warwick’s performance, largely brings the comedy to a screeching halt.

These difficulties in the script limit what could have been, with this cast, a strong show indeed. It is revealed in an early scene that the island of Bulwick has only one swing voter, a funny idea that could have been used more but instead is mostly ignored for the rest of the show. The comedy needed some kind of stakes to keep the audience invested and to build the dramatic tension McGuchan is clearly going for at the end.

As it is, I spent the whole show wondering why they were campaigning at all and not just paying lip service to this one man. Throughout, the show had nice comedic ideas, but it stunted the growth of any drama. The show is, or at least could quite easily be, a tragedy. Remove the wackier bits and this would be an interesting, if not overly challenging, study of one man’s struggle with expectations and his own wishes. Sadly, the two elements of this play are constantly fighting each other - Beige’s inner conflict drags down the comedy around him and the comedy around him muffles his conflict.

Overall, this show needs a bit of an overhaul in one way or another. Pump up Beige’s character comedically and it would flow together much more nicely or scrap the stranger bits of comedy and leave us with the darker elements. What the show is now is a confused mess of the two with not enough comedy to warrant lots of laughs but not enough tragedy to warrant thinking about it too much. Pick a side and the show could be bright and interesting – as it is, it’s really rather Beige.

Beige is on at the Corpus Playroom until 24th February