The Next Big Thing
at Pleasance (Venue 33), Edinburgh

Marcus Gilchrist

This short Australian play is a humorous stab at the modern trend of self-promotion through suffering.

Trapped in a sitcom contract, award nominee Casper St Clair teams up with one-time child star Mickey Miller to fake St Clair's kidnapping on the night of the annual awards ceremony. As they watch the senational results of their actions unfold on the television, the two men anticipate the approach of the circus of anguish as the police and the media close in on the 'stalker' and his 'victim'. As other wannabes jostle to express their devastation to the cameras they start to realise that everyone wants to cash in on the tragedy.

It is an intersting idea that the only way Casper thought he could get out of his contact without reprecussions was to plead emotional trauma. At first, he seems entirely cynical about this. When Mickey starts to wallow in the belief that his early success ruined his life, Casper quickly points out all the benefits of early fame. While other 17-year olds struggled for a date, they had women, wealth and celebrity falling at their feet. Later, however, Casper tells an anecdote about his father which expresses the modern trend of finding someone to blame for one's success rather than someone to thank.

The play is almost believable in these post-Diana times. Nowadays, leeway always seems to be given to the traumatised and success is seen as emotionally unsafe. I couldn't help feeling, though, that the characters would have to have been idiots to have thought they would get away with it. Depite a predictable ending, I felt the play got its points across in an entertaining manner. Not too much insight, but then 50 minutes isn't long and I always welcome a dig at emotional correctness, even if this particular dig didn't go far enough in caricaturing the sham of the damaged celebrity. In the end, Sleigh was criticising the hijacking of suffering, not its celebration.