There’s a very good reason to go and see Clive at the Arcola in Dalston, and it’s called Paul Keating. The two-time Olivier Award nominee holds the floor here in a 65-minute monologue with a bucket-load of charisma, mesmerizingly watchable as he flits about the stage as Thomas, twitching with nervous energy.

Thomas lives alone in a starkly white flat, connecting with other humans only via text message, email, and Zoom meetings. The only friend he sees is his giant cactus, Clive, who he cares for like a pet and talks to like a mate. As his remote working life disintegrates, the play grapples with deeper themes: loneliness, depression, the lasting consequences of childhood bullying.

In truth, it is in the final act – the last twenty minutes or so – of this play that it really comes alive. With changes in time indicated only by the flicker of the lights in his flat, we are never really sure how much time is passing for Thomas, though we come to realise that it is months rather than days. This draws us into Thomas’s world, in which each day is much like the last and, before he knows it, he hasn’t left his flat in years.

The difficulty with this subject matter is that it is, for many of us, rather uncomfortably close to home. With the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic still raw in many of our recent memories, this transports us back to a world of enforced isolation, confronting us not with hidden truths but with memories of our own lived realities. Perhaps it is for this reason that the early parts of the play, whilst charmingly familiar, lack gravitas. The remote-working tribulations, around which the first half of the monologue is almost exclusively based, are bitty and far more trivial than the issues that the author eventually gets on to, and for quite a while we wonder what the Big Point is. Perhaps there isn’t one, I started to think after twenty-five minutes or so – perhaps this is just a meditation on the fact that solo remote working renders our lives bitty and trivial. And there would have been nothing wrong with that in principle – I’d just hoped for more because, you know, there’s a big potted cactus on stage and surely that had a purpose.

But no, Wynne does have a point. And when the big issues do land, they pack some serious punch. The final third of the play is a fizzing, emotional exploration of male mental health – on the effects of loneliness, victimhood, and the male experience of depression. These are still issues that many men find it difficult to confront openly, and Clive brings them to life without either preaching about them or despairing of them – Wynne should be commended for that.

The set design is superb in its simplicity – the wall of innumerable cupboards, which Thomas constantly opens and interacts with – adding humour and symbolism in equal measure. Likewise Bailey’s direction, which sees Thomas constantly on the move in a claustrophobically small space.

But the biggest praise must be reserved for Keating, who brings Thomas to life memorably, charmingly, and rivetingly. He absolutely embodies the fidgety, OCD-ish, occasionally desperate man, who lives on beans, spies on his neighbours, skates about his white vinyl floor in mop slippers.

It would have been funnier if the cactus had been bigger. But the cactus isn’t the star here, Keating is. Go for him.

Review by Daniel Bennett

Clive is on at The Arcola Theatre until 23rd August. You can find out more and book tickets here.

If you like this review you might also like my reviews of The Daughter of Time, Just For One Day and The Play That Goes Wrong.