Review: The Awkward Guide to Friendship (The Wardrobe Theatre)

Review by Charles Hubbard

⭐️⭐️⭐️ 

There’s no shortage of media about the difficulty of navigating romantic relationships. Artists like Woody Allen, Albert Brooks and Richard Curtis have built their entire careers around detailing the intricacies and complications of adult romance to the tune of huge critical and commercial success. However, rarely does material aimed squarely at adult audiences seek to take physical attraction out of the equation and really get to grips with the thrills, nerves and frustrations of platonic relationships. The Awkward Guide to Friendship - an artistic collaboration between poet Beth Calverley and musician Beth Roberts - looks to fill that void, though with extreme tentativeness. It points out that supporting a friendship over the course of many years, especially when played out over long distance, can be just as difficult as keeping the flame alive in a romantic relationship. Though even the action of pointing something like this out seems a little too bold for a show that is as endearingly shy as its main character.

Beth Calverley (playing an onstage version of herself) was always the most introverted child in the playground and, as adolescence came and went, very little changed on that account. Never particularly good at making friends, and facing a quarter-life crisis in which her social circle seems to be shrinking from its already modest scale, she seeks a guide to friendship that forms the show’s concept, framing device and title. In a presumably fictionalised retelling of their first encounter, she meets Beth Roberts (also playing herself, among other characters) and, loving her music, suggests that they collaborate on such a guide. You slowly realise that the opening scene is a depiction of how the show you’re actually watching came to be. And it only gets more meta from there.

The optics and subject matter of the show, especially with Calverley’s flatly school-teacher-esque delivery, make it feel like you are being taken straight back to primary school, sitting cross-legged on a carpet square and hearing about how to navigate life now that you’ve reached the ripe old age of eight. This is almost certainly intentional as Calverley and Roberts seek to get the audience in that exact headspace by making them breathe deeply in and out at the beginning of the show - one of many clever and unifying instances of direct audience involvement. At times, it almost plays like a much more family-friendly version of the musical Avenue Q, in which the attitudes and lessons from Sesame Street are repurposed into a guide for people living in their early 20s. Fortunately, there’s considerably less puppet sex in this one.

While it’s nice to see a show that dives headfirst into a childlike view of adulthood (while never indulging in active childishness), it would have perhaps been nice to see a slightly more robust critique of the show’s own devices and an acknowledgement that the simple truths of childhood friendship do not always withstand close scrutiny once you turn 18 and leave home. That said, I can understand why Calverley and Roberts don’t want to undercut their unflinchingly sincere approach that gives the show its distinctive tone and aesthetic.

The show is perhaps most interesting when viewed as a dissection of how much the digital era has changed friendship. While the presence of mobile phones and the internet has made it superficially easier for people to regularly connect over vast distances, it’s also meant that entire friendships can be made or broken through a pair of digital ticks turning blue. Or, even worse, those ticks turning blue and a reply never being sent. The scene in which Calverley and Roberts act out sending frustrated voice messages to each other is perhaps the best sequence in the entire show and anyone who has ever been too annoyed with someone to merely express themselves in the written word will certainly be able to relate.

While the show presents and markets itself as a two-hander, Calverley is the only true lead here. The script charts her emotional progression in a way that gives the show focus and makes it feel personal but also somewhat kneecaps Roberts as a performer. Roberts is clearly an extremely talented musician and her skill at looping repeated sound through a scene, whether it be from her guitar or her enticingly strange, dissonant vocal riffs, is on full display (though I wish the show had utilised the technique of Foley a little bit more - its effect is fascinating on the few occasions it is used). However, her character - or perhaps ‘persona’ would be a better term - remains a cipher until the very end of the show.

While Calverley plays herself the entire time, Roberts has to jump from being herself to playing a high-vis-clad embodiment of the titular guide to providing the musical underscoring for much of the show, leaving her characterisation very thin on the ground. While this isn’t a problem in and of itself (plays starring two people don’t necessarily have to give each performer an equal share of the spotlight), it stops the central friendship between Calverley and Roberts from being fleshed out in the way that it should. The impact of their collaboration going through difficulties in the latter half of the show is blunted by the fact that the audience never really gets to experience their friendship while it is thriving.

All that being said, the show is still disarmingly insightful, and even the most hardened audience member is likely to be at least a little charmed by how committed the show is to being itself, even at the risk of looking uncool. But, in its current form, it feels a little stuck between two modes. It is neither quite funny nor stylised enough to work as an intentionally didactic guide to friendship in your twenties, nor sufficiently focused on its central relationship to succeed as an account of the friendship between its two artistic collaborators. I suspect the show will really start to flourish once Calverley and Roberts further home in on what they really want it to be. I do hope it gets the chance to flourish - it’s much too sweet and engaging to die on the vine.

The Awkward Guide to Friendship has closed at the Wardrobe but will be playing at the Front Room at Weston Super Mare on 2nd October. Tickets from https://frontroomwsm.com/event/the-awkward-guide-to-friendship 

Photos by Rowan Elliott.