The theme of lucid dreaming has a lot potential. The ability to enter a dream state while still conscious and then to enter a world that essentially has no constraints, sound fantastic or does it? In Reverie, the theatre company attempt to explore this strange virtual world and the problems that can arise from it.
James gets offered a research job which really pleases his current girlfriend who despairs of his rather lax approach to developing his career. And the job is right up his street researching his own lucid dreaming skills which his previous studies have centred on. Now the problems begin. As he starts exploring his own lucid dream scape where he is the lord and master of everything, his previous girl friend enters and the tear between dream and reality now slowly begins to tear into him. Does he love his real and current girlfriend or his previous and now virtual girlfriend? Who knows, he doesn't?
The acting is good, real and believable characters, delivered by competent actors and a simple but effective set. But the issue of lucid dreaming which only occasionally throws up some exciting and interesting conundrums during the course of the play frankly is for the most part irrelevant. Being torn between two lovers even if one of them is a dream isn't something new and this play doesn't explore this issue any differently to a million other Mills & Boon stories you can find out there, or use the vehicle of lucid dreaming to add very much.
In the end it's a play about angst and if there's anything worse than just plain old angst it's plain old middle class angst. Can James get his life back on track and decide which girl friend to settle for? Can he pull out of his sad obsession? There was little drama for me because I really didn't care. It was the writing rather more than the acting which led me to grow increasingly bored during this 60 minutes which only occasionally rose above the threshold of average.
Times
4-30 August (Not the 17th) 17:40 [Suitable 12+]
Ticket Prices
£8 / £6.50 Concessions