At the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, I saw one of the first productions of Wedding Band. In a few words, this play will never make it to the West End without returning the story to the drawing boards. The potential is certain, but the story had so many places to go and fell flat. There was no climax or falling action to the story. The story drove in a straight line without twists, turns, hills, or valleys. It was an emotional argument that lasted for three hours. Where suspense, despair, moments of passion, drama, or anything mildly interesting in storytelling nature went is beyond me.
It started with so much buildup that made me so excited for the first thirty minutes. A rich woman who mysteriously rents a house in a neighborhood below her means? Yes, please. She accidentally lets slip she is seeing someone? More questions to be answered, yes please!! But then we meet the man. He is without any charm or context that allows me to believe their romance. I didn’t understand the nature of it at all. Even just one scene of genuine connection would have sold me of why they fight so damn hard for each other. Instead, my fellow audience members and I were left to fill in gaps with our imaginations to an unreasonable degree.
The production needed a backstory. I see a trope of friends to lovers or rivals to lovers that would have added spunk to the plot. It was just so static for such a fight for freedom and love. We as the audience were lost in a beige-lighted stage where characters argued and threw obscenities at each other for hours. There was only one scene that invested me in a moment, a lyric of the scene. One line that caught my attention and grace went something like “Holding her feels like holding the warmth of a Carolina summer. Her kisses are of the sweet nectar of blackberries.”. Wow. Beautiful and full of life, but this was the only line that we had that sounded like this and put the other lines out of place. If the play carried a little more of the rest of this kind of energy, I think it would have been so triumphant. For a play that focuses on love as such a major theme, the romantics were spread far and focused on how the woman could serve her man. And for being SO in love, so much so that they would risk everything else in their lives, they didn’t support each other enough. She came to see him and take care of him when he was sick, and he gave her some money. That was it. They were separated so much during the production even when he was well, and chemistry was lost.
The set consisted of a few gates, windows, and fences that lowered and shifted about to mimic the walls of this particular Black neighborhood of the 20s. It was minimalist and extremely industrial, which actually reminded me a bit of Hadestown. I think one scene or two of something resembling organic growth or life would have served to give this scene a little life. I could see the desolate and desperate imagery that (perhaps) they were going for, but it felt forced and blended into the scene for lack of action.
The acting was fine. Fine is the best way I can put it. Because it’s not like the actors had anywhere to go with the static emotion and energy (which is the fault of the writing), but no one stood out to me. It felt like something like a high school cafetorium production. I didn’t have any sense of true sense of feeling. It felt like they knew their lines but didn’t know how to say them. Some of the actors had completely contradictory behaviors, and that made them plot devices instead of people.
Theatre in London U of A 