You couldn’t make it up if you tried

Lands isn’t really about anything. On the face of it, it consists of watching a tragicomedic farce about a woman who can’t stop bouncing on a trampoline and her friend who tries in vain to get her off. But what could have been a somewhat insensitive piece about addiction becomes both darker and funnier thanks to the tiresomely mundane setting. Sophie is doing a puzzle, describing the pieces into a microphone, possibly for a blog or podcast. Leah Brotherhead is jumping on a mini-trampoline (trampette for the purists). Leah tells a story about Gordon Ramsay, and eats a satsuma. Sophie makes a connection and does a dance. Leah throws the fruit peel on the floor and Sophie ends up picking it up after asking her several times to do it herself.

And so emerges the tension, from the cracks and the slightly sharper than necessary words. It soon becomes apparent that Leah can’t get off the trampoline, won’t get off the trampoline. Why? Who knows, but, like that, the two women who had previously been so absorbed in their own lives as to not notice the other’s bizarre habits come to loggerheads. Leah is fantastic, a volatile mix of self-pity and anger – not an easy thing to pull off when bouncing up and down – who faces being slapped, shouted at and abused, all in the name of helping her. It would take the sensitivity of a stone not to hear the subtext roar of “METAPHOR” but cliché is (narrowly) avoided, due, in large part, to the fact that this is a trampoline we are talking about.

The normally slick script, handily provided on the night, allows the actors space to improvise and decide themselves how things should sound. This often came in the form of a little note after a line saying “Actors may choose how many times this is repeated”. This was sometimes less effective as they really took this advice to heart, spewing out enormous refrains of “I can’t”, “Go” and “Leave me alone”.

When Leah does finally step down off the trampoline, for the first time. the air rings with the lack of creaking bed springs, which had become so present I noticed more that they were gone. There is another metaphor in that somewhere. Sophie’s attempts to lure Leah away from her compulsive hobby only serve to make Sophie look as unhinged as Leah, only with a hobby more acceptable to the public mind. Further intellectual deliberations are interrupted by a hilarious, though terrifyingly realistic fight, that results in a puzzle being thrown on the floor. While ridiculous, the play has so effectively enveloped me at this point, I keen with Sophie as she literally picks up the pieces. As I said at the beginning, Lands isn’t really about anything, just two friends, who like the rest of us can’t always take their blinkers off and see the people around them until it really is too late.

-4 stars