Review: Spanish Oranges (Playground Theatre)

Review by Lily Melhuish

⭐️⭐️

There’s an art to writing stories about the rich, the people who seemingly glide through life on a cushion of class and connections, and still making us simple folk sympathise with them. I’m reminded of Schitt’s Creek, with the well-to-do but fallen-from-grace Roses who embrace the melodrama of their noble echo chamber, or the way Succession turned a gaggle of privileged narcissists into the internet’s babygirls. The best versions of these stories don’t ask for sympathy; they earn it, by peeling back the façade and showing us the fear and longing underneath.

Spanish Oranges, written by Alba Arikha and directed by Myriam Cyr, aims for that kind of emotional unmasking, but too often it lands in “boohoo, so what?” territory. Set over a single morning in a cosy North London home, it’s a story about sharing the spotlight in a marriage. Unfortunately, in an era inundated with divorce albums, tell-all documentaries, and televised court cases, Spanish Oranges is disappointingly bland.

Fiona (Maryam D’Abo) is a novelist on the cusp of major success, preparing for an interview about her upcoming book Spanish Oranges. Her husband Ivo is a formerly celebrated actor whose career has imploded after a public accusation of assault. The journalist (Jay Villiers) who arrives uses all the clever tactics: flattery, transparency, empathy, before going in for the kill. He pushes and presses to test whether Fiona will defend her husband, whether her rising star depends on his fall, and whether loyalty can survive scandal.

The biggest issue is how rehearsed it all feels. The mid-play reveal, and subsequent twists, arrive with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, and once you can see the mechanism turning, suspense drains away. The play tries to plant intrigue, about Fiona’s book’s autobiographical inspirations, about who is exploiting whom, but the shape of the story rarely surprises.

And because the plot hinges on a shock reveal, it also muffles the humour. There are jokes tucked into the dialogue, but it’s hard to relax into them when the scene is continually asking you to watch the trick rather than the people. Comedy relies on timing, and here the timing often feels strangled by the concept. The dialogue is also frequently lush and literary, screaming inauthenticity from the artistic characters. Information arrives in relentless waves: Fiona’s background, the book’s parallels, the interview’s frame, the relationship history. Instead of allowing breathing room for us to feel what matters, we’re handed what to think, and at length.

In the writer’s note, Arikha describes an interest in power imbalance. I could see what the play wanted to explore, but I rarely felt it in the dynamics. Fiona is seemingly the one ascending, yet the gravitational pull of the story remains loyal to her husband Ivo: his scandal, his rage, his need to dominate the narrative. Her success becomes background noise to his crisis, which undercuts the very tension the play sets out to examine.

The set, designed by Livi Carpenter, compounds the chaos of living in a state of flux with a reasonable decrease in funds. A landscape of stacked possessions and domestic clutter signals privilege and excess, but it doesn’t deepen the emotional stakes, it mostly makes the space feel constipated. If the goal is to expose vulnerability, a stage crowded with "stuff" ends up insulating the characters rather than stripping them bare, portraying a family that have long lived beyond their means.

The play's momentum is largely thanks to Jay Villiers, who finds a push-pull rhythm and gives the evening some urgency. There are also fleeting moments of genuine tenderness - a shared memory of a holiday to Tuscany, a heartfelt compliment, physical touches that hint at who this couple used to be - but they’re too rare. The piece circles huge topics (reputation, artistic ownership, #MeToo) without the nuance needed to make them land as lived experience rather than argument points. The daughter, Lydia (Arianna Branca), is introduced to add another dimension, yet her presence often feels like an intermittent device rather than an emotionally integrated youthful perspective.

Again and again, the script returns to questions of truth: what’s real, what’s performed, what’s mined for art. Yet the irony is that even the raw confrontations feel managed, less like emotion overflowing and more like two people taking the stand. Spanish Oranges has an enticing premise and a few flashes of honesty, but for a story so preoccupied with authenticity, it’s frustratingly short on it.

Spanish Oranges plays at The Playground Theatre until 7th March. Tickets from https://www.theplaygroundtheatre.org.uk/projects/spanish-oranges-

Photos by Counterminers