Review: WHAT WOULD JARVIS DO? at Omnibus Theatre

Best friends Didi and GG are super-fans of Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker. When they get their hands on a pair of yellow trousers supposedly worn by the Britpop icon himself, they’re over the moon - until they realise the trousers never actually belonged to Jarvis. Their quest to retrieve the real trousers leads them to their therapist’s home, where they find themselves caught in a time loop where things get more and more bizarre.

As a surrealist, absurdist black comedy, What Would Jarvis Do? has some decent moments of humour, but a lot of the time I felt as though I was laughing because I wasn’t sure how else to react. The storyline was confusing to follow, and half-way through pivoted into what felt like a horror movie, but the moments of genuine unsettling creepiness were offset by the pointless randomness of the comedy. At one point, GG puts on and then takes off a dress in dramatic slow-motion, and it’s funny for the first few seconds before one becomes eager for the show to just get on with it. The funniest part of the play was the way the characters often behaved as though something completely ridiculous was perfectly normal, but after a while even this grew stale. More than that, the randomness and the going round and round in circles became unbearably frustrating after a while - perhaps meant to mirror the characters’ own frustration as they keep hitting roadblocks in their quest to find Jarvis Crocker’s trousers?

But what is the point? It felt like the play was trying to comment on multiple topics without wholeheartedly committing to them. There’s an element of grieving and the inability to let go in the girls’ single-minded mission to find the trousers at all costs. There are vague references to Covid and lockdown, which was writer Laura Grillo’s primary inspiration. The meandering, Groundhog Day narrative and repetition of specific conversations or lines feel like a metaphor for a mental health crisis, and how depression sometimes drives you to do the same thing over and over because the predictability feels comforting. There are some moments of profundity when we get an insight into the two girls’ mental health struggles, and some real gut-punch lines about the banal futility of life, but these get so bogged down in the mire that I’d forgotten about them by the time we progressed to the next scene.

Maybe there wasn’t meant to be a point, and the vagueness of the storytelling opened the way for us to apply our own personal interpretation to the narrative. Certainly as I left the theatre I heard audience members theorising about what the play could have meant. (A popular theory seemed to be that GG is dead and the whole show is a hallucination Didi conjured up to cope with the reality.) But it also felt like the audience was primed for a twist or emotional gut-punch that never came.

The saving grace of this show is really its cast, who are all utterly charming and earnestly embrace the weirdness of their roles. The characters are deliberately slapstick and cartoonish in their mannerisms and lines. Isabel Butt is especially endearing as the ditzy GG, with her impeccable comedic timing, hilarious inflections, and ability to deliver the most horrifying statements in a sweet, dreamy tone. Annabel Smith is also entertaining as the neurotic and bullheadedly determined Didi, especially as she starts to lose patience with the ongoing shenanigans. Maggie Daniels steals the show as Ms Lacy, the girls’ unconventional therapist, with her utterly deadpan delivery of her most outrageous and outlandish lines. Henry Miller as Ms Lacey’s husband (and possible prisoner?) Mister and Gigi Zahir as her gigantic but infantile son Christopher are equally convincing in their zany characters, switching easily between pitiful and frightening.

But even with a talented cast and a premise that is quirky and fun, What Would Jarvis Do? just throws so much unpredictability at us that the story begins to drag, and the humour starts to feel overdone and trite. It feels like it could have been so much more meaningful and profound had it not clung so resolutely to its commitment to being bizarre for the sake of being bizarre.