Leopards Review
Venue: Rose Theatre Kingston
Dates: 2 Sept - 25 Sept
OUR VERDICT:
If you have tickets to see Leopards at the Rose Theatre in Kingston, you can expect to be asked (several times) not to spoil the ending.
When you arrive at the theatre, posters in the bar and on the backs of toilet doors exhort audience members to keep the secrets - there’s even a dedicated hashtag: #KeepTheThrillAlive.
It’s easy to understand why. The play (clocking in at just 90 minutes with no interval) is taut, breathless, and loaded with surprises – the sort of thing that (like revenge) is best enjoyed cold.
The premise is simple: Ben Harris, the high-powered CEO of a climate change charity, has been invited to a hotel bar to dispense career advice to Niala, an ambitious twenty-something.
It’s a situation fraught with #MeToo resonances, and the audience is naturally on its guard against Ben. But as the clock ticks on, it becomes clear that it’s the shy and awestruck Niala we should be watching closely, and that her motives for requesting this meeting run a lot deeper than the desire to pad out her CV.
Along the way, Leopards engages with a veritable checklist of contemporary anxieties: race, gender, climate change, consent, abuse… and while the play doesn’t quite have the scope to deep-dive into each of these issues within its tight run-time, it certainly does a good job of turning some of our assumptions on their heads.
The questions raised early on about the generational legacy of our actions with regard to climate change certainly gain new, more personal resonances as we learn more about Niala and Ben’s tangled backstory.
A play with only two characters is obviously going to stand or fall on the strength of its central performances – and thankfully, these are rock solid.
Martin Marquez as Ben is by turns bumblingly avuncular and chillingly self-interested, while Saffron Coomber as Niala delivers quicksilver transitions between shyness, seduction, and raw, buckling grief.
Alys Metcalf’s script is strong, and frequently very funny (although, naturally, there are fewer laughs as the run time progresses).
Lily Arnold’s set is excellent, skewering an overpriced London hotel full of scalloped chairs and Art Deco touches. The play also boasts an Intimacy Director (Asha Jennings-Grant), who choreographed the fraught bedroom scenes in which secrets are revealed thick and fast.
Overall, Leopards is edge-of-your-seat stuff: at times, it’s a stressful and slightly claustrophobic watch, but it’s certainly never boring.
When the play reached its (bleak) conclusion, I couldn’t wait to leave the theatre and gulp up some fresh air – which, far from an insult, I mean as a testament to the power of this intense little piece of theatre.
