The Good Canary (Kingston)

Interesting, as this has been on my radar for months but slots being scarce, I didn't want to risk booking ahead. Shame the matinees are so early; any idea of the running time, please, David J?

Is this touring or going into the West End after Kingston?

Yes, Kingston is not local for me either - got home just before midnight!

Just seen another good review but ye gods, the prices! They appear to have whacked them up for this, which either shows confidence or need to cover higher costs or both, but given that you have to add not one but two booking fees to your ticket (I know Theatremonkey's site currently lists an offer minus these), it makes for a very expensive visit. I usually pay up to £20 for a production at the Rose but wouldn't be able to get even a poor seat at that price for this one - unless I sat on the floor, which injury won't allow.

The highest priced ticket is £41 on the theatre's website. What am I missing here?

Copying my mini essay I wrote about this play because I hated it so much.

I went to see ‘Good Canary’ 3 days before press night. It was perhaps the worst thing I have ever seen and I previously have stated this to my friends thinking that the reviews would shed light on the piss poor production. I was thoroughly surprised and disappointed when reviews today have given ‘Good Canary’ a mix of three and four stars, because the show is offensively bad in every way that I can think of and I wish to not encourage more plays of this calibre anywhere near the stage.


‘Good Canary’ fails on every front, it is overacted, (perhaps due to it being) awfully directed, the set design is the worst eyesore I have seen on any professional stage, the script itself it’s so riddled with plot holes and cliché’s that me and Saxon where constantly cringing. Certain elements of the script weren’t even just bad, but offensive in its portrayal of both mental illness and drug addiction, which practically infuriated us both.

I am a firm believer that you can tell fairly accurately how good a play will be in the first few minutes of the performance. The first few minutes in this case started with Freya Mayor being transported in on a laughable track system, where she then turned downstage and mimed throwing up unconvincingly. It was already here why I started questioning what I had got myself in for. When the next scene, continued using this track system of transporting in scenery I was more suspecting, when the back three columns lit up as screens that used images as background scenery I already knew this play was not what I was hoping it to be. The use of these screens were tacky and ugly, the device of moving the screens a little bit forward and backward to feign a three dimensional environment did little to help this. Being at the front of the audience I could see the pixels of these images, which remained a constant glaring eyesore. Due to chairs, tables and other miscellaneous scenery being flown horizontally using the track system, the actors had to unhook the chairs from the tables at the beginning of every scene, and replace them at the end. This poorly planned device meant that no matter the nature of a characters exit they would have to hook their chair back up to the table, creating a laughable moment where a character has to storm off, but first had to carefully hook their chair back up to the table; at one point and actor obviously struggled to hook his chair back up, having to readjust the chair multiple times, again taking us out the action and making us cringe at the poor decisions this play had made.



The set design was just the first of this play’s troubles. John Malkovich’s directing meant that every actor was overacting, showing highly charged but embarrassingly unconvincing akin to a bad soap opera. This was especially disappointing as I admire Malkovich so much as an actor myself I had believed that he would at least know how to create believable performances in other actors. I saw that the stage had compared Freya Mayor’s performance to Denise Gough. Whilst the two actors were indeed both playing drug addicts the key difference here being that whilst Gough’s performance was among the best I haves seen this year, Mayors was among the worse – depending on which scene ranging from mediocre to absolutely embarrassing. In her suicide scene, what should have been horrific was so badly performed by Mayor, who flopped on the stage in an attempt to convulse, that me and Saxon had to try and stifle laughter. Malkovich’s poor directing extended much further than creating poor performances, however. Throughout the production Malkovich implemented many embarrassing, thoughtless decisions. At one point a character walked on stage brought (an obviously empty) bottle of champagne and two glasses on to the stage which ended up not being touched or mentioned by either of the actors for the entirety of the scene until the same actor brought them off again as the scene finished. There was for more than just thoughtless directing displayed here, whole scenes which had obviously been carefully planned out failed in anything other than making me have to hold in laughter. For example a piece of unexplained choreographed movement section placed within the mostly naturalistically performed play had phone conversation had the two characters walking towards and away from each other in a sort of tug of war they talked, for seemingly no reason (their dialogue was a friendly conversation, not an argument) then joining more actors, also on phones, in a sort of circle shuffle. Watching this I was utterly confused and cringing hard. The worst example perhaps was a scene where Mayor’s character is cleaning the room on speed Malkovich had her cartwheeling around the stage whilst a sped up, high pitched version of Snow White’s ‘Whistle While You Work’ played (to show she was on speed, well done Malkovich). Here the background screens started to use animations, the windows elongating, which Mayor had to look at as if confused before miming along with the screen as if to use her brush to squish the window back into its original state – this looked so bad I laughed. Also as a side not, speed isn’t hallucinogenic. This brings me on to the writing which was, as well as full of plot holes and clichés, offensive in its unrealistic portrayal of drugs and, more importantly, of PTSD from sexual abuse.



I cannot understand how anyone could have read Zach Helm’s play and thought, ‘this looks great! Let’s produce it for the stage’. I have seen productions written by amateur local writers that have been better. I am even more intrigued (possibly disgusted) that Helm’s play has, as Wikipedia describes, ‘noted for its searing language, dark humor and deeply complex characters, is a direct challenge to American misogyny and elitism’. The play does not challenge misogyny but instead reinforces it, with two female characters. One cannot survive without her partner and commits suicide when he leaves, the other (a brief side character) talks only of decorating her house using her rich husbands wealth. Wikipedia goes on to claim the fact that the play ‘openly criticizes America's culture towards women, which partially explains why Helm has yet to produce the play in the United States.’ That is a lie, the only reason I can think of is because no-one in their right mind would touch this play with a bargepole. The characters are not ‘complex’ they are shockingly two dimensional. The main character out of the blue asks another ‘So when were you raped?’ This is Helm telling us the main character was raped as a child. Throughout the play this is used only as a weak explanation for the character’s self-destructive behaviour, not explored in any depth, making the portrayal of PTSD from child abuse incredibly offensive. Add to this a healthy dose of plot holes such as a boyfriend paying a drug dealer twelve thousand dollars to not sell anymore drugs to his girlfriend (couldn’t she just find other drug dealers) and a character claiming she can’t sign a contract for another book because she ‘doesn’t have another book in her’ when it is later revealed after her death she has a full collection of works, poetry and essays, and you have one awful script.



I feel like I haven’t even scratched the surface here, there is so much more to say but I have already spent too much time on this when I should be preparing for uni. The script is riddled with cliché’s, it’s idea of the world is completely nonsensical (no one gets offered one million pounds for a book deal anymore, if ever),the play was so badly directed and acted I was cringing the whole three hours it dragged on for. I cannot see how this play has got anything other than a one star review, let alone how it sold out runs in Mexico and was met with acclaim in Paris. It is the biggest mystery of my young life.