Theatre review: James Graham's Sketching

Apparently kicked off by his feeling guilty about having three plays in West End theatres in the last year while other writers struggle to get work staged, James Graham's Sketching sees him take that high profile and use it to put a few emerging playwrights in the spotlight. His idea for doing this was an update of Charles Dickens' early hit Sketches by Boz, a collection of character pieces set around Victorian London, with the gimmick that this would be the first "crowdsourced" play, accepting submissions of short plays that would be woven into the overall story. Eight playwrights' submissions were eventually accepted, and Thomas Hescott directs Samuel James, Penny Layden, Nav Sidhu, Sean Michael Verey and Sophie Wu in around fifty roles between them. Graham himself contributes four storylines that try to link all the different threads together over the course of 24 hours.

These include "Katie and Tom Try to Move On," in which Wu and Verey are an ex-couple (not Holmes and Cruise... I don't think,) meeting again some months after breaking up, and "A Rebellion in Theatreland," in which Layden and Sidhu are stage door keepers organising a strike of all the underappreciated theatre workers.

In "Peter Piper Has a Plan" James plays a gangster whose first day out of prison involves getting the ravens to flee the Tower of London and stealing the internet, while "The Widow and the Songbird" is a bit of a weak inclusion, as Layden's widow believing her late husband has been reincarnated as a nightingale is a cheesy story that doesn't add much. And then there's the four stories by other writers - four rather than eight, which raises the obvious question of what happened to the other half, especially as they're all listed in the programme. But unless they each consist of a throwaway line somewhere, Ella Langely's "Arnav the Route Master," Aaron Douglas' "The Keycutter's Daughter," Adam Hughes' "Petra's Polski Sklep" and Chloe Mi Lin Ewart's "The Physicist and the Fortune-Teller" weren't actually performed on Press Night. Does the play alternate different versions on different nights? I can't find any suggestion of this in the publicity. Or were four of the stories dropped so late in the day they were already included in the programme? (And if the latter, how late in rehearsals did they realise the show was going to run past midnight if they didn't cut them?)

The scenes that have survived include Naomi Westerman's "The Conceptual Artists," in which Layden and Wu's squatters wreck a mansion and try to get out of trouble by pretending it's an art installation, and Sumerah Srivastav's "Mo's Second Hand Shop," which starts underwhelmingly but has a nasty twist in store. One of the most memorable stories is Alan Gordon's "The Emancipation of Shona Bell-e," in which Verey's timid Scottish theatre usher has hidden behind his drag persona (James) to the extent that she's taken over his life. And one intriguing thread to keep coming back to is Himanshu Ojha's "The Hand of Hozan," in which Verey's sewer worker finds a severed hand, and tries to help Layden's overworked cop solve the murder of the asylum seeker (Sidhu in flashback) it came from - for one of the more interesting stories it disappointingly fizzles out though.

And it's not alone in that, as endings turn out not be be Sketching's strong suit regardless of who's written the segment. One of Graham's own stories does have a sting in its tale revealing a villain as suitably Dickensian as Srivastav's, but while the various threads sometimes weave in an out of each other they don't tie together quite as satisfyingly as one might have hoped, making the second half frustrating (full disclosure, I was ill watching this so that might have affected how patient I was willing to be with the stories; plus the acoustics aren't always great so I did miss some lines of dialogue, especially early on.) It remains an interesting experiment, and a show with a strong visual identity in Ellan Parry's design and particularly Daniel Denton's heavily-used video projections, and given its Victorian origins Wilton's Music Hall is a suitable home for it; it just hasn't quite translated into the major event it might have been.

James Graham's Sketching by James Graham, Aaron Douglas, Adam Hughes, Alan Gordon, Chloe Mi Lin Ewart, Ella Langley, Himanshu Ojha, Naomi Westerman and Sumerah Srivastav is booking until the 27th of October at Wilton's Music Hall.

Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Simon Annand.