Theatre Review: GNAW at the Nottingham Playhouse

How can the same species who arranged the moon landings - with a 2B pencil and a tumbler of Jack Daniels - have designed the printer? There are neurosurgeons in the QMC right now rotating someone’s grey matter with their thumbs like a Rubix Cube - and meanwhile at Printer HQ, after decades of painstaking research, the best answer they can come up with for the question ‘can it actually put some inked letters onto the page?’ is ‘very occasionally, if you don’t sneeze too loudly’.

You’d need serious courage, then, to design a solo show whose central prop is a functioning printer - but that’s what actor and writer Daniel McVey has chosen to do with ‘GNAW’, performed as part of Nottingham Playhouse’s yearly dramatic romp, the Amplify Festival.

Said printer, placed on the floor, forms part of a stripped-down office set: GNAW follows everyman grist-for-the-capitalist-mill George, whose preoccupations are the TV show Tipping Point and absent-mindedly photocopying his own limbs. After making a minor decision that causes him to miss his bus after work, he sees a troubling event which sends him into spirals of trauma, wonder and self-recrimination. With growing disturbance, he watches the consequences of the event play out on the news. Are there two Georges, he wonders - one who made each decision - or was this destined to happen?

Alongside presenting George’s undecorated life in muted tones, Daniel lets loose by stepping aside to a microphone on stage left, each time incarnated as another lively character from one of George’s dreams. These swift monologues feature the tale of a girl swept from the side of a mountain, a neighbourhood curtain-twitcher arrested for taking sordid photos from a treehouse (with the flash on), an alien reborn as an awkward human in their late 20s, and more to boot.

Each of these episodes is funny: gracefully written and acted. And although there’s no A-to-B logical connection between George’s increasingly neurotic questions and the variety show which appears in his dreams, the themes of both strands are exposed alongside one another - the cost of inaction, the burden of being cut off from one another, the absurdity lurking under the crust of everyday niceties. 

If GNAW is a high-concept, fast-moving play, then it's McVey's performance which acts as the seatbelt. As George he strikes that balance between warm and weighed-down, becoming easy to root for, as someone too considerate to want to trouble you with their own troubles. McVey’s stage presence throughout is a bit like a shaded lamp: warm, soft but luminous. And as a playwright it takes skill to make a monologue about determinism feel like a sugar high, but that's how GNAW comes across. So, here we find an actor and writer who should be blinking on the radar of every curious theatre-goer in Notts and beyond. 

Credit goes to Playhouse, too for having the play fully signed; and to Sophie Jane Corner and Sam Osborne, directing movement and light respectively. GNAW ends on a buoyant moment of crowd participation, trusting that even in society’s murkier seasons, its audience doesn’t want to sit by and let bad things happen. And we don’t.

And the printer works throughout. Maybe there’s hope for us yet.