OUR VERDICT
'A play without a soul' is Richard Davies' verdict of Cougar, which is showing at Orange Tree until March 2.
Cougar is a new one-act play by Rose Lewenstein showing this month at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, which continues to build its reputation as a leading showcase for emerging theatre talent.
In case you were wondering, ‘Cougar’ is a term invented in North America in the noughties to describe an older woman with a predatory attitude towards younger men. This perfectly describes the character of Leila, delightfully performed by Charlotte Randle. In the opening scene, we meet her in a hotel bedroom with John, a scouse waiter played by Mike Noble, who is struggling with a killer hangover to remember how he got there. We discover that they share a loathing for wasted resources. Leila, who works in corporate social responsibility, wants to save the planet; John confines his ambitions to finishing the half-empty wine bottles left over at the corporate event where he was serving the drinks, resulting in him getting into a fight with one of Leila’s colleagues in a misguided act of drunken chivalry.
John loses one job but finds another - as Leila’s latest love interest, to be whisked off to exotic locations around the globe where she addresses conferences about the need to reduce our carbon footprint. As you can imagine, the irony is laid on in thick coatings.
The play progresses through 80 short scenes that flash by like a stroboscope. While the city outside changes – Rio, Mumbai, Cape Town, Bangkok, Cancun - the corporate hotel bedroom stays the same. At first, John is seduced by the glamorous lifestyle, as Leila upgrades his cheap clobber for Gucci and gives him free access to the minibar. But eventually, he realises that he has become a bonded sex slave, tied to someone who refuses any real intimacy and who, on the way home from these jollies, “won’t kiss after customs”.
Leila, it turns out, is a real piece of work; a corporate psychopath. And rather like the song in Damn Yankees, “Whatever Leila wants, Leila gets.” As her career advances and her salary trebles, her self-obsession and desire for ego gratification become insatiable. While some women might choose a night in with Pretty Woman and a bottle of Sauvignon, Leila acts out her fantasies to be ‘bought’ by selling her body on the streets of Bangkok’s Pat pong meat market. She casts aside her vegetarianism to gouge on raw steak, “craving for something that lived, something that had a heart”. The message is that anything a man can do, Leila can do worse.
Although well-acted and brilliantly directed by Chelsea Walker (who last year gave us the excellent Low-Level Panic at the Orange Tree), I found Cougar to be a play without a soul. There is a lack of any real emotional development in the characters. Leila, in particular, comes across as a two-dimensional vehicle for the author’s satirical observations about corporate climate change warriors. Having said that, there is enough clever dialogue and original thinking in this play to demonstrate that Lewenstein is definitely a writer to watch.
Venue: The Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond
Dates: 7 February - 2 March
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