Bears Bears Bears has some strong writing and superb acting of a faltering, trepidatiously diverging relationship. The writer, Natalie Beech, won a playwrighting competition, DCC playwright Prize, ran by theatre and creative education company Divided Culture Co. (among other accolades including winning Women X Film Festival Script Competition, which is bring produced by BFI for this summer).
The scenes of narrative and action of the couple, Jake and Jen, played by Jordan Akkaya and Jenna Sian O’Hara, are sort of punctuated by Jenn, who recounts a documentary, a fairytale story, a survey all about bears. The play sort of reads like a research process a writer might undertake when wanting to write and flesh out the idea of what does it mean to choose between a bear and a man. Jodie, played by Shifaa Arfan, symbolises herself, passive and agreeable and searching for love, but also a life wanting to be shared which compels both Jodie and Jake to grow closer to each other.
The set is pretty plain, a few tree stumps which surround a fire pit of sticks, and sometimes we are asked to imagine a scene in a club, or a scene in a house, or a scene with other people (not shown but responded to) which feels more budget constraints than creative constraints. Thinking about Beech’s other work, I can see how her foray into film and TV hence makes her play a bit multi-modal, fitting both live shows and recorded shows.
The show does well to explore what happens when a relationship begins to change, changes which challenge its foundations – foundation being career and no children, maybe no marriage. Jake challenges this, with a mortgage, maybe ideas of wanting a child. Jen’s career, secretive and not as apparent, also creates tension in their coupledom.
The ending (spoilers) heightens the ambiguity of whether this relationship survives over whether there’s a crime committed… together, i.e. Jake and Jen… or whether the crimes committed to Jen, i.e she is murdered. We see Jodie entirely, of course as a present character but also flashbacks and the ambiguity over who killed who is compelling. Maybe too ambiguous, as I arrived firmly to the literal conclusion that they both did commit a crime though other readings can say that we see Jake, the nice guy, show his final, nice act to be murder and as such we see the play through Jodie’s eyes, now afraid but also sympathetic, as she is caught in Jake’s locked house with a body bag full of incriminating evidence as Jake pleads innocence. The final scene, with the fire pit glowing on their faces as the light fades and Jenn walks backwards, away from them, has a beautiful resonance here.
Bears Bears Bears runs at Contact (Space 2) until May 16.
JADAR 