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Review: Sorry (I Broke Your Arms and Legs) (Pleasance Theatre)

Review by Sam Waite

 

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

 

When you’re young, every event feels major and every failing like the end of the world. Who among us can truly say they never made a mountain out of a molehill in their school years, or a mountain range out of a clump of dirt, as is often closer to the truth. Perhaps this universal truth is why it’s easy to connect with the 12 (and a half) year old protagonist of Sorry (I Broke Your Arms and Legs), playing now at London’s Pleasance Theatre.

 


In James Akka’s self-performed one-man play, we find Sam Wilson, of Class 8C, in the hospital room of a fellow year 8 to make the titular apology, presumably one of the outcomes of his failed quest to be named Head Boy. The identity of the unlucky classmate is unclear, but thankfully the ever-studious Sam has prepared a PowerPoint presentation to give him, and the audience, context for the incident. Actually, Sam has prepared a few presentations, branching off with this central apology, so dedicated is he to our clarity (also, he did wonder whether this apology might be graded!)

 

Akka’s play allows him ample opportunity to fall back on the nostalgic days many in attendance will have of creating their first PowerPoints, with spinning entrances delaying his reading and a liberal touch of Comic Sans throughout. However, the character is so indelible, so rife with humorous idiosyncrasies that the show could keep an audience’s attention without any visual aids. From his fixation on academic superiority (he has all the badges… not PE), to his rivalry with another Year 8 Sam whose place in the alphabet puts him atop lists (as a fellow Sam W, I felt this), Sam Wilson is an endless, unnerving delight.

 


Caleb Barron, co-founder of production company Maybe You Like It, also acts as director here, keeping up a sense of momentum even as we are literally sharing a single space with Sam while he makes him overlong apology. With Barron’s support, Akka’s story has a genuine sense of movement behind it, locations not simply described but all too easy to imagine for ourselves. Barron also does a fine job alternately reigning in or letting loose Akka’s more eccentric touches as a performer, helping Sam to feel both completely absurd and recognisably a human being struggling for connection.

 

Akka himself is a dynamic and exciting performer, outfitted in a prep school uniform complete with knee-length shorts and knee-high socks. Allowing us to gradually understand more about Sam, and especially that there may be some more intimate feeling lurking beneath both his only real friendship and at least one of his deeply-felt rivalries, Akka manages the tricky task of making his audience see how ridiculous th character is being while allowing them to still root for and connect with him. Sam Wilson, 8C, is a young boy in need of understanding, and someone who has placed far too much importance on something that won’t matter by the end of the school year – again, who among us can’t connect with that?


 

Scattered with allusions to the present day and to its creator, Sorry is a sharp, funny piece of theatre that manages to be charming and unsettling in equal measure. For every moment where the world of Year 8 is firmly alive and all there is to this character, there are quick nods to reality – Sam asks a Head Boy rival why he speaks with an American accent when he’s British, to be met with a question of why he has so much facial hair when he’s 12. This back and forth between painful seriousness and loose, malleable comedy allows Akka’s writing and performance to shine their brightest, and by the end it’s actually believable that this hospitalised Year 8 may actually forgive Sam Wilson.

 

Powerful when it needs to be, delightfully absurd when it doesn’t, Sorry (I Broke Your Arms and Legs) is completely ridiculous, utterly silly, completely compelling theatre. Smart enough to be quite so stupid and still genuinely heartfelt, emotional storytelling, this one-hander finds new ways to keep crowds laughing until the very last moment, while also ending on a hopeful note that lets us know that this troubled protagonist will, eventually, be okay.

 

Sorry (I Broke Your Arms and Legs) plays at the Pleasance Theatre until May 9th 

 

 

Photos by Caleb Barron, from a previous run

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