Trust

Trust is the brainchild of German playwright Faik Richter and translated by Maja Zade. It focuses of capitalism through the eyes of a relationship, or at least this is what the blurb tells me.

I found ‘Trust’ utterly confusing and frequently unclear as to the point it was trying to hammer home. Whilst I understood the overarching theme that our current system, is as broken as the relationship depicted in the play many of the other metaphors and nuances went over my head.

The show flicks between a monologue to several breakup scenes including a televised Jerry Springer style one and culminates in yoga. The audience are asked to become involved by barking, drinking tequila and having aeroplane blankets handed out to them. This list of seemingly random things just helps demonstrate my difficulty in understanding ‘Trust’ and any themes that tied them together.

It is an uncomfortable feeling leaving the theatre thinking that you didn’t quite ‘get it’ or that maybe you simply aren’t intelligent enough or well read enough to understand the piece and that was the feeling that Trust left me with. Upon reflection it is a failing with either the piece itself or the direction, or as I suspect a combination of the both, that an audience member leaves this way. Ambiguity, varying interpretations and independent thought within theatre is to be encouraged however there is a gulf between this and the simple lack of understand I felt I left with.

The set was a simple black box but as the play went on the space became more and more cluttered which visually looked visually intriguing but there is little point in intrigue if the foundation of the play itself is unstable.

The cast were made up of Jude Christian (who also directed it), Pia Laborde Noguez and Zephryn Taitte were all remarkably committed to the play however there was no build up of empathy or any other emotion towards any of them. Other than simply feeling confused I was left feeling than in Richter’s view the world is clearly doomed, there was very little light to the shade and consequently nobody was worth saving!

Overall this felt like a pretentious piece, often trying to be clever but frequently missing opportunities to drive home the underlying layers to the play and could not be further from the saying that simple can be effective.

To find out more about Trust visit The Gate’s website.

If you liked this review you might also like my review of Hir and The Ferryman.