I’m not breaking any new ground when I say that the dispossessed and downtrodden are excluded from the theatre-going populace. Theatre tickets are so expensive, and the medium is considered to be so comparatively ‘high-brow’ that plays are, in practice, still very much the preserve of the middle and upper classes.
As a result, theatre that tries to empathise with the unheard, or that attempts to give them a voice, can cross over into being patronising at best and smarmily self-congratulatory at worst, regardless of how noble the intentions might be.
Wish List, I’m pleased to report, is no such failure. Through a combination of grounded, affecting drama and some superlative performances, Amari Creak and Georgia Riley’s production of Katherine Soper’s 2016 show manages to feel truly genuine.
Tamsin (Theodore Anderson-Lincoln) is a nineteen-year-old warehouse box packer. Following her mother’s death she is also solely responsible for their younger brother Dean (Joe Noble), who suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Battling with the Department of Work and Pensions and spending most of their days at an interminable, soul-sucking job, Tamsin is a character who, in the hands of a lesser writer or performer, might be pitiable. But pity is not what Tamsin, or the play, want. They want to make you angry. And it works.
Dean obsessively gels and re-gels his hair, won’t eat most foods, refuses to leave the house, can’t even speak on the phone, and is obviously incapable of working. The continued insistence of the faceless bureaucrats that he is ineligible for benefits is legitimately infuriating.
So too is the sterile, unfeeling culture within the warehouse, and the insistence that Tamsin meet her targets lest they be unceremoniously laid off. The repeated mantra of “the only limitations are the limitations you set for yourself” is particularly chilling, a stark reminder of the corporate ability to blame people for circumstances out of their control. If Tamsin isn’t hitting those targets, says the company, she has nobody to blame but herself.
This is a primal scream of a play. It’s a cry of righteous anger from the millions left behind by austerity politics, seen only as collateral damage by an uncaring system that places efficiency above all. It has only become more pressing, urgent, and cuttingly pertinent over the near-decade since its original release as the pandemic and the cost of living crisis have pushed more and more into this kind of untenable situation.
Anderson-Lincoln’s performance as Tamsin is exceptionally good. They play the part with restraint, on the whole, and it makes the moments where they do fracture under the strain all the more impactful. They’re sweet, awkward, charming and funny, hammering in how undeserving Tamsin is of the hand they have been dealt.
There are subtle complexities to Anderson-Lincoln’s performance that they elevate the already realistic material they have been given. My personal favourite of these was when Tamsin is first given her hi-vis jacket and accidentally puts it on the wrong way, perfectly conveying their stressed distraction with a single action. Tamsin is a person, really and truly, and the writing and performance are integral to the character not coming off as condescending or caricatured.
Noble also excels as Dean. He compensates for the character’s comparative lack of dialogue with constant movement – jittering, shuffling, hair gelling, whatever. He sells Dean’s nervousness and frustration perfectly throughout and never loses sight of the character’s nuances.
He brings a sympathetic quality to Dean’s story, but again, pity is not the point. The show is brutally honest in its depiction of the character: Dean’s OCD isn’t his fault of course, but it’s not easy for Tamsin to remind themself of that fact every minute of every day. Nobody is at fault here beyond the society that refuses to accommodate him.
Nitheeshan Gunanantham plays Luke, Tamsin’s colleague, friend and eventual love interest, and provides more or less the only ray of light in an otherwise bleak show. Gunanantham brings some delightful comedic instinct to his scenes alongside genuine and endearing chemistry with Anderson-Lincoln.
A clear standout is a scene where the two of them let loose to Meat Loaf’s ‘I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)’. It’s sweet and touching and joyful. More than that, it’s just as real as all of the awful things the play has Tamsin go through, and just as critically important to the show.
The least prominent character is the unnamed Lead, played fantastically by Pablo Miguel, but he has his own role in the themes within the story. For much of the play he is the personification of the oppressive system, a robotic jobsworth with seemingly no care or concern for the wellbeing of Tamsin or Luke.
Later on, however, he is humanised, to an extent. We find out that he has a family of his own to provide for, and he knows that being nice to Tamsin will only hurt both of them in the long run. “It’s nothing personal”, he says, highlighting the analytical coldness of the process he is complicit in. He might claim to want to help Tamsin, but he is unwilling to go outside the system to do so.
Designers Robyn Montano and Bea Kirkland must also be commended, not only for acquiring a truly inordinate number of cardboard boxes and the simple genius of putting stagehands in hi-vis jackets, but also for perfectly creating a world of contrasts. Tamsin and Dean’s chaotic yet lived-in home thrown into relief by the clinical order of the warehouse floor.
Every item packed, every box rolled along the conveyor, every scrap of paperwork filed – it’s exhausting just to watch. And that, I suppose, is the point of Wish List. The ending might provide a tiny glimmer of hope – Tamsin is sure she will ‘make it through’, and her relationship with Luke is the happiest they have been in years – but for an audience member, the overwhelming feeling is one of oppression.
As Tamsin is slowly crushed under the weight of government bureaucracy and corporate middle management, the audience feels an empathetic draining pressure. If the play can get you to feel even a fraction of the misery and despair of the Tamsin’s of the real world, it’s done its job.
You’ll probably feel awful after watching it, and the heartbreakingly excellent script, production and performances are all to blame. But, just like the system it so artfully skewers, I don’t think the play really cares.
