I don’t drink alcohol. It’s not for any particular reason, I just never really started and am firmly in ‘too late now’ territory. But I have to say, if I was looking for validation of that particular life choice, Pour Me would probably provide it.
The penultimate play of UMDS’s Autumn Fringe season, written and directed by Yelena Finnegan and assistant directed by Jasmine Nieradzick-Burbeck, Pour Me concerns four alcoholics and their hapless group leader at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
And that’s it.
Group leader Tim Thomas (Cameron Howden) gets locked in a toilet early on and the others call the fire brigade to get him out, but from there the show consists almost entirely of the group doing nothing more than talking. About themselves, about drinking, and about each other. In the traditional sense, it’s not really ‘about’ anything.
Pour Me gets away with being virtually plotless by positioning itself primarily as a comedy piece, and it has to be stressed here that the show is always, at the very least, amusing. At times it crosses into being so uproariously funny that it becomes difficult to make out the dialogue over audience laughter.
The first ten minutes set the tone perfectly for the show, with fantastically awkward character comedy culminating in the delightfully absurd sequence mentioned earlier, where the group leader gets stuck in a toilet cubicle and the others try multiple (unsuccessful) methods to free him. Ingeniously, this all happens offstage and so the audience is left to interpret what might be going on through the characters’ words alone. Tim remains trapped offstage for the rest of the show, and his occasional incredulous interjections make for some of its best lines.
The characters are the real meat of Pour Me, and they are all played excellently by their respective performers. Each showcases a different aspect of alcoholism, a different kind of person that might fall into the addiction. Jonty (Ben McCamley) ended up there for no reason beyond the hell of it – a twentysomething drifter with more money than sense, he regales the other drinkers and the audience with tales of his intoxicated exploits at Notting Hill Carnival.
His obnoxious, upper-class vernacular gets laughs that can only come from a place of genuine contempt. Yet he comes out of it all as one of the show’s more sympathetic characters, charmingly entertaining Tim’s baffling musings after everyone else has written him off. Tim himself is probably the show’s comedic high-water mark, despite his rather limited time onstage: Howden imbues the character with simultaneous over and under-confidence, and manages to deliver multiple jokes with the same punchline and get a laugh each time
Katie, played by Lola Corcoran, is the only woman of the group, and serves as something of a middle ground between the other characters. Despite her backstory being possibly the most outlandish of all: including (but not limited to) her flushing fish down the toilet and destroying all of her belongings, Corcoran deadpans her way through the increasingly ridiculous anecdotes in a way that is both funny and manages to make her seem the most normal out of everyone.
Peter (Laurie Cracknell) is not, as he claims, actually an alcoholic. Instead he is an undercover reporter, deceiving the rest of the group in an attempt to write a scathing hit piece about their meetings. While this leads to some great jokes, particularly when he stands up to tell his story like the others and ends up just recounting the plot of Trainspotting, it’s also an excellent commentary on media sensationalism around alcoholism and the lack of empathy afforded to its victims, however unlikeable they (Jonty) may be.
The final character is Shane (Tom Pyle), and he comes last for a reason. He has very few lines for the first half of the play, seemingly uninterested in the meeting and the others’ ridiculous behaviour, and the reason for this becomes apparent when he finally does tell his own story. In a fantastic choice from designer Isobel Watson, there’s no spotlight or music on him, unlike everyone else. He doesn’t stand at the front of the stage and use exaggerated gestures to get his point across. Instead, he just sits in his chair and describes to the group how his drinking led him to gamble away both his money and, eventually, his marriage.
It feels strange to label it the standout scene in a play that’s so explicitly a comedy, but it also wouldn’t work half as well if it didn’t come after forty minutes of farce. After the audience has become acclimated to the heightened ridiculousness of the show’s characters, once we have forgotten why they are all in that cold, empty church in the first place, we get a harshly cruel reminder of how alcoholism actually affects real people, not the caricatures of the play. It’s here that the almost panoptic quality of the show’s staging is highlighted, as we are made to feel like all-seeing intruders on these people’s private lives.
Pour Me ends with a flash forward to a year later, as Peter and Shane explain that they decided to collaborate on Peter’s article and that the group have remained in touch and meet up from time to time. It does feel a little unearned, and it somewhat stretches belief that the two would have made up so easily given the enormous argument they had when Shane found Peter out.
But at the same time, who really cares? Sometimes things can just be nice. And seeing the group continue to move ahead in their quest for sobriety, five disparate personalities united through adversity, is indeed… nice.
I’ll drink to that.
