Four Minutes Twelve Seconds ****

Hampstead Theatre

EXCERPT: "the play and production's various problems are overweighed by the dialogue, characters and relationships, which are clearly beautifully written. Most importantly, we can wholly understand where each person's coming from and - bar the aforementioned video publishing - the very hard decisions they make."

Summary

Seventeen year old Jack is the apple of his mother’s eye. Di and David have devoted their whole lives to giving him every opportunity they never had – and as a result, Jack is smart, outgoing, and well on his way to achieving the grades to study Law at Durham University. But a startling incident outside the school gates threatens to ruin everything they’ve striven for, an incident that suggests a deep hatred of their son… As events begin to accelerate, Di and David start to doubt Jack’s closest friends, Jack himself, and ultimately themselves – who can they trust? In a world where smartphones are ubiquitous, James Fritz’s deeply provocative and topical drama throws a light on the sorts of insidious opportunities new technology offers – where nothing dies online, except reputation.

Thoughts

James Fritz's play Four Minutes Twelve Seconds gets better as it progresses. When it started, I found Anna Ledwich's slightly abstract directorial approach distanced us from the truthfulness of the dialogue. I also felt its use of suspense - created by constantly referring to something we didn't know about - was over engineered and that it was rather a box-ticking way to engage our attention. Too many short scenes - and accompanying blackouts - is structurally problematic. Furthermore, there is one twist that I simply couldn't get on board with: I couldn't believe that a father would publish a potentially incriminating video of his son forcibly having sex with his girlfriend, nor that he would feel proud of him having watched it, and that that would act as sufficient motivation for him to share it on his Internet forum.

However, these problems are overweighed by the play itself, which is fundamentally great. Despite not having the best actors - I felt only Alexander Arnold as Nick fully showed the supremely high quality that the writing demanded - the dialogue, characters and relationships are clearly beautifully written. Most importantly, we can wholly understand where each person's coming from and - bar the aforementioned video publishing - the very hard decisions they make. I totally empathised with each and every one of them and their situations. What was so brilliant was that, in so doing, I was forced to think about provocative issues and engage with contentious issues - about blindness to loved one's faults, the responsibility of parents to their adult children, the way that retribution is often a clean cut way to draw a line under issues for spectators without actually solving anything for those involved, and how much cruelty, heartbreak and violence is prevalent - but fairly unremarked on - in society. It exposed the latter without me feeling like it was a cliche, and - more than that - made me realise it was probably very unremarkable and that these reactions were similarly probably very standard.