If the Basement were a human being it would be a cross dresser: one night an elegant lady, the next a garish whore. For tonight’s opening of I Won’t Be Happy Until I Lose One Of My Limbs the building is no longer a darkened dungeon but an hallucinogenic miniaturized Kiwi town populated by ice cream vendors and Astroturf, paddling pools and bark symbolising mountainous terrain.

The audience are invited to become part of this scenery. Instead of being alien onlookers, we’re talked to and approached by the actors, and as such a rather awkward transition occurs between real life and hyper-real life; the cagey blurring of what’s character and what’s ordinary person, what’s performance and what’s ‘natural’. Perhaps this was intentional? An experiment aimed at isolating these two concepts once and for all? Outcome: awkwardness.

The town we’ve stumbled into – essentially become part of – is Love Mountain: so completely, literally devised by designer Stephen Bain that it’s rather more like a budget movie than the stark intimations of the usual theatre set. If it were a movie it would be one part The Price of Milk and one part The League of Gentlemen.

Billed as an apocalyptic dissection of Kiwi life, I Won’t Be Happy… is a dark and clever meander around a small town invented by an imaginative mind. Writer Julie Hill crafts characters to populate Love Mountain that are new and strange; likeably odd people for whom the limitations of the town metamorphose into limitations on their lives and colour the nature of their dreams.

Gareth Reeves and Nisha Madhan together suit up to bring the entire town to life. Reeves delivers believable parity between characters as diverse as an imaginary friend to a back-water mullet-sporting kid. Madhan takes on, amongst others, the main character of artistically temperamental O’Gradient.

O’Gradient is a commentary on the strangeness of body dysmorphic disorder and the over sensitive ‘I’m more special than you’ sensibilities of The Artist around whom the story centres and the town eventually falls.

Both actors do a wonderful job of remaining buoyant, aware and connected in what is an extremely challenging series of events, called upon as they are to change pace, character, setting, scene and 45s on a record player for over an hour. Part of this, no doubt, is due to Andrew Foster’s direction.

There is a certain off-kilter magic to this town, where the ordinary transcends into a soft madness in the inhabitants. It feels like Reeves and Madhan are letting this town speak through them, embedded in the acting this requires, whilst simultaneously remaining caretakers of the audience. Both actors are on tightrope wires, a hair’s breadth between controlling both or losing either. Yet through a shaky start, both actors emerge, warming to this schizophrenic atmosphere and drawing the audience into this unstable and wonderful place. 

As directed by Foster, I Won’t Be Happy…  is an altogether experimental work that feels as though it would be more at home on the big screen and which in part sounds more like ‘reading’ a book (if you can possibly follow my meaning). The fact that it is brought to life as a piece of theatre is both brave and foolish –foolish in an endearing way – in that the decision to say a lot and act a little less breaks so many rules, you’d either have to be a fool or very wise to pull it off. So does it pull it off? Mostly, yes.

I say it could be a book because the writing is so good, the characters so thoughtful and on the whole unique, that if they were on the page I would keep reading. I say it could be a movie because the aesthetic intentions are so clearly pivotal to the overall theme that if it were a movie the cinematography would have the same delightful play of colour, styling and placement as a Wes Anderson film. But in the end it’s a piece of theatre and must be regarded as such.

One of the stranger elements resulting from this decision comes with the breaking of the fourth wall: the audience are the hills, the people at the party, the sun-baked plebeians eating ice cream, the drunken dancers at a bar. This produces an atmosphere of the experimental. As the audience we’re looking in on the process whilst it’s still half occurring; we’re addressed directly and then asked to switch back into voyeurs.

Part of the script is what seem to be stage directions read aloud. With a set that’s already an entire town, this sometimes over-bakes an already highly stimulated environment and the use of microphones to distinguish between ‘acting’ and ‘scene setting’ is a little jarring. Again it feels like the play, though valiantly rendered, would perhaps better manifest itself on film where the need to explain each character change and scene shift could be done nonverbally.

However what begins as perplexing shifts into enjoyable when you open yourself to the newness of I Won’t Be Happy…  The living and interactive setting becomes a town, the characters spin around you to make a motion joyful to watch. Though each character’s time is split they’re split evenly and I don’t find I favour one over the other. Each time a town member becomes the focus I am glad again to see them.

I Won’t Be Happy…is brave, original and potentially a pretty amazing first draft of a novel of screenplay for a movie I’d very much like to see. 
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