Simon Ward reviews Persona at the King’s Head Theatre

Another day, another play set in a posh-dinner-party-gone-wrong, see last month’s ★★★Dinner Party From Hell for details. There must be something in the ether. It is a well-worn technique – the characters all gathered together in close proximity, the tongue-loosening wine with the potential to unleash pent-up emotion, the endless etiquette challenges of serving and eating food – but to work successfully the rhythm and the tone must be just right. Because the audience knows the setup so well, anything that does not quite land will jar and grate. So it is, unfortunately, with Persona. With such a short run, one wonders whether there was quite enough rehearsal time with director Olivia Woods to get everything in place for the first night. There was not enough light and shade, or variation in pace and tone, for the writing to shine in the way that it might have. Some promising lines went unheard and it felt like there was more comedy to be mined, if only the timing could be improved.

Reminiscent of a murder mystery setup, with echoes too of An Inspector Calls, three twenty-something friends from boarding school, Rupert (Cameron Forrest), Geoffrey (Elliott Diner) and Gemma (Polly Towers) have been summoned to an out-of-way country house. They are reluctant since the friend who has invited them, James (Max Allen, who also wrote piece), was peripheral to their group, at best. However, the lure is the reading of the will of another friend, Justin, from which they all hope to gain. But as each new person arrives, the awkwardness of the situation continues to increase. Even though James now apparently holds all the cards – he is, after all, the host, and he is the keeper of the will – his status as barely-tolerated hanger-on to the group has not changed at all. While Rupert, Geoffrey and Gemma may have their differences, they feel themselves to be fundamentally the same tribe. They reserve the right to look down on and ridicule James simply because he is not.

Persona, of the title, seems to be a kind of role-playing parlour game which the group once played with horrific consequences. The question that James wants the answer to is whether they are still all actually role-playing. If they could drop the masks could they still be friends with him as he believes they once were? He even sets the will-reading up as a kind of game, one last desperate blood-stained attempt to be loved. But the truth is, he will never truly be accepted and there is absolutely nothing that he can do about it. There is no gap between appearance and reality – the shallow, greedy, entitled faces that we see are the only ones they have. They are creatures of their upbringing and their environment – too rich to even ultimately care about the potential legacy, preferring to leave the awkwardness behind and get drunk in a London nightclub once again. They are, in fact, the monsters that they seem to be.

Persona is running at the King’s Head Theatre, 116P Upper Street, London N1 1QP until Tuesday 30th June