Anna Burnside reviews a production with strong elements but has a script that still needs some work.
Amid the detritus of wings, fries and greasy napkins, Jamie is setting up a chess game. But instead of his expected friend, a girl from school arrives in the chicken shop to confront him.
At first the dynamics are straightforward. Scheme queen Kyla (Yolanda Mitchell) calls Jamie (Testimony Adegbite) “Sheldon” after the ubernerd from The Big Bang Theory. She makes it absolutely clear where he stands in the social pecking order: the bottom.
But as the chess match proceeds and Kyla’s mission becomes clear, the ground between them shifts. It’s slowly revealed that Jamie witnessed Kyla being assaulted at a party and reported it to the police. Kyla wants him to retract. Jamie is adamant that he is doing the right thing.
Katy Nixon’s play, winner of A Play, A Pie and A Pint’s David MacLennan award for emerging writers, has vivid characters and excellent dialogue. Kyla is full of brittle braggadocio while Jamie, diffident and mansplainy at first, slowly reveals his enthusiasms, excellent memory and scathing impressions of the school hard men.
Where it falls down is plot, which is slight and thin. So little happens that there is time for an extended fantasy dance sequence in which both characters use string theory to explore alternative visions of their futures. And it still comes in at 45 minutes.
Brian Logan’s direction is sparky, and he gets excellent performances out of his young cast. What he can’t do is make the ending stronger and fully develop a piece which has the potential to be something special. In its current iteration, it has clear strengths but is nowhere near fully realised.
Cheapo performs at Oran Mor’s A Play, A Pie and A Pint until October 4, 2025. It then tours to Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre (October 7-10, 2025) and Aberdeen’s Lemon Tree (October 14-18, 2025).
Photo by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan.
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