Review: Rock Bottom (directed by Charlie Day for Fresh Life Theatre) at The Lion & Unicorn Theatre, London, June 2021
Writer and director Charlie Day began his fragmentation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in May 2020 with Helena: Ugly as a Bear, a film recorded in isolation and based on Fresh Life Theatre’s planned ‘Shakespearean Tragedy’ stage adaptation of Dream which was never able to tour thanks to the pandemic. This was followed in June by Hermia: Heaven unto Hell, which took a similar premise but benefited from the relaxation of lockdown restrictions to allow the cast to venture beyond their bedrooms and shoot themselves on location in actual woodland. Day returned to his dark reimagining of Dream once more in November 2020 with Mortal Fools, a choose-your-own-adventure style game featuring characters and settings from Helena and Hermia.
Gemma Allred noted last year the ‘common thread of male toxicity’ to be found in Helena and Hermia, most strongly felt in Day’s aggressive, controlling and savage adaptation of Puck. This toxicity is ultimately turned onto the audience themselves in Mortal Fools as the character breaks the fourth wall with threats of violence towards those watching if they don’t make the choices he wants. Which brings us to Rock Bottom, a show somewhere between a spin-off from Day’s online Dream adaptations and, to steal a phrase from Douglas Adams, the fourth in the trilogy. If the three lockdown productions centred on the consequences of toxic masculinity and male entitlement on young women, then Rock Bottom showed the impact it can have on young men, with themes of mental health, loneliness and conformity to negative social norms all being addressed throughout the hour-long one-person show.
Day doesn’t launch straight into these issues, however. The opening act of the show offers a modern take on Shakespeare’s brash weaver and would-be thespian Nick Bottom (Day). Turning up expecting to perform Pyramus & Thisbe, Bottom had been abandoned by his fellow mechanicals, but decided to press ahead with the performance nonetheless under the belief that the audience only really wanted to see him anyway. The performance soon fell apart, with Bottom offering stand-up style monologues interspersed with snatches of the ‘intended’ show. Day’s focus in this opening section was comedy above all else, combining the misplaced self-assuredness of The Office’s David Brent and cringe-worthy am-dram of The League of Gentlemen’s Legz Akimbo Theatre Company to entertainingly knock Shakespeare off the high-culture pedestal it’s still too often placed upon. A sequence in which Bottom performed an interpretive mime act to a recording of himself grandiosely reciting Jacques’s ‘seven ages of man’ speech from As You Like It over an intensely dramatic score offered a perfectly pitched example of this, as well as showcasing Day’s charming and impressive affinity for comic performance.
After reenacting his meeting with the Fairy Queen, playing both parts himself, Bottom’s tone shifted and the show turned more significantly towards its more serious focus. Initially playing up to the laddish stereotype of bragging about a one-night stand, it soon became clear how deeply affected Bottom had been by the fact that Titania had returned to Oberon (here an anonymous love rival in Bottom’s anecdote) so soon after their brief encounter. A melancholic song performed on a ukulele felt like the first true insight into the sadness and self-doubt Day’s character was masking through his bravado and desire to perform. As Bottom descended further into anxiety, Rock Bottom too became intentionally more frenetic, jumping between tones and ideas as if emulating Bottom’s mind firing off in all directions. Despite Bottom’s assertion that the show was not a ‘therapy session’ for him, Day’s ability to connect with the audience gave a palpable sense that we were hearing Bottom laying bare his feelings in a way that he perhaps never had before.
Although thoroughly modernised, Bottom still remained a believable adaptation of Shakespeare’s character, helped in no small part by Day seriously knowing his Shakespeare. The online Dream trilogy was characterised by its clever ‘inter-Shax-tuality’, drawing from several plays and sonnets in addition to its primary text. Rock Bottom was no different, Shakespearean lines and allusions peppering its modern English script. A section performed like a beat poem interspersed ideas of what happiness means and if it’s truly attainable was the pinnacle of Day’s achievement in this, carefully plucking phrases and images from throughout Shakespeare to fit beautifully into the picture Bottom painted of the mental health struggles of modern life. Whilst not a show overtly reflecting our wider pandemic moment, Rock Bottom nonetheless gained an extra timeliness by being performed as the UK prepared to emerge from lockdown — something that will bring its own mental challenges, just as living in social isolation did.
The idea of comedic performance hiding deep personal anguish is an established trope by this point, with several figures from both fiction and (sadly) real life likely to come to mind fairly readily. The concept of a one-person show based around a Shakespearean character also isn’t new — Tim Crouch’s I, Shakespeare series arguably being the most well-known and critically-acclaimed examples of this approach. That said, neither of these facts detract whatsoever from Rock Bottom as a funny, heartfelt, perceptive and poignant Shakespeare adaptation in its own right, which also stands tall as a showcase for Day’s abilities as a writer, director and performer. Indeed, Rock Bottom fits comfortably and deservedly alongside its forebears, offering an enjoyably effective and sincerely affective Shakespearean update for 2021.
Day is curently performing Rock Bottom around the UK. The next performances are scheduled at The Alma Tavern, Bristol, on 29 and 31 July. Tickets are available here. Look out for future dates on Fresh Life’s Twitter account here.
Rock Bottom
Presented by Fresh Life Theatre at The Lion & Unicorn Theatre, London. 21–23 June, 2021. Written and directed by Charlie Day. With Charlie Day (Nick Bottom).
