Big Big Sky - Hampstead Downstairs

I love Tom Wells's plays. I'm seeing this in a couple of weeks and can't wait. He's the most underrated of our contemporary playwrights maybe this will be the play that gives him a more wide-ranging popular success.

I've seen 3 Tom Wells plays now, including this one (the other two, "The Kitchen Sink" and "Jumpers for Goalposts" I saw at the Bush Theatre), and of them, I should have thought "Jumpers for Goalposts," rather than this one, is the one that should eventually propel Tom Wells to a greater level of success. All it takes is for that one to be made into a movie, as it's a much more commercial story of a perpetually losing five-a-side football team, "Barely Athletic," taking on local heavyweights "Tranny United," and all the personal travails each of the loveable members of "Barely Athletic" go through. It is arguably much funnier than this play, as it contains more witty and sarcastic characters than the eccentric and sincere ones in this play, and includes significantly more dramatic events than occur in "Big Big Sky," which, by contrast, is a gentle dealing-with-grief-and-isolation play.

As such, I don't think this play is particularly funny, so I certainly shouldn't blame "Londoners" for not laughing much. It is quirky and warm and more than anything, utterly sincere in it's love of everyday ordinary human beings.

That last quality, of Tom Wells, is what makes this play, about birdwatchers and cafe owners converging in a small town near Hull, so pleasurable to watch. It's simply lovely to spend time with Jennifer Daley's understanding and generous cafe owner and Sam Newton's stumbling and stuttering and blundering bird watcher, and Matt Sutton's clumsy blustering father figure, and Jessica Jolley's sparky and yearning daughter and cafe worker.

Jolley's character is the closest to being genuinely funny, as her character has a charged attitude to all the other characters that brings a spark to all her interactions, and the actor really captures that so truthfully and endearingly.

But even then, the play's focus on grief doesn't really lend itself to humour, and Tom Wells' heartfelt sincerity would never allow him to plunge into insincerity and wit to make fun of the grieving process. Indeed, in "The Kitchen Sink," Well's funniest joke was an explicit laser-like critique, of London's love of insincerity, when Ryan Sampson's artist character's sincere loving portrait of Dolly Parton is continuously mistaken for some kind of ironic critique of Parton by a London art school.

Another playwright might make fun of the eccentric behaviour in this play, and get major comic mileage out of it at the expense of the characters, but Tom Wells refuses to do that. So this play is more smiles than laughs.

What this play IS like is spending two hours with lovely people, that gives you an insight into the human condition, and leaves you feeling uplifted when you leave the theatre.

An acquaintance of mine compared the play to "Eastenders," because it's "just people talking," but it presents a playwrights's singular conception of the human condition, and is not the work of a string of different writers playing up punchy melodrama to titillate an audience. So for me, unlike Eastenders, this is more than the sum of it's parts.

For me, 4 stars.

I absolutely loved this when I saw it around two weeks ago. Tom Wells, although reasonably well known in theatrical terms, deserves far greater exposure than he has so far received (are you listening NT ?)

Based on the fact that absolutely everyone on here loved this - and that I've been wanting to see something Tom Wells has written for a while (and was so sad to see how quickly this originally sold out) - I went to randomly check if any tickets have become available and have just booked one for Monday evening! I cannot wait! 

Tom Wells' The Kitchen Sink has just opened at the Queen's Theatre, Hornchurch. Runs until 2 April.

2-for-1 tickets available as part of that National Lottery initiative.