Set entirely in an apartment building lobby, Jeff the chatty and somewhat gormless doorman and his officious supervisor William are joined by cynical cop Bill and his admiring rookie Dawn. As each character is added to the mix, complications arise, each struggling with how to present the truth, or whether to cover it up altogether.

Dawn is faced with a pending assault charge, on top of which she’s beginning to discover life in the police force is not as black and white as her own idealistic notions. William’s brother’s trouble with the law is dragged into the spotlight and becomes the heart of the conflict.

With credible, lively dialogue, each scene feeds nicely into the next, building up the tension. The characters are played off against each other mostly in pairs, with the occasional triad and quartet creating extra tension and a feeling that there’s just not enough room in this little lobby for these four large personalities.

Although it’s set in Nooyawk, replete with (mostly credible) accents, the themes are not too far from home – an up close and personal look at the abuse of power within a fraught legal system, loyalty vs. honesty, etc. – pretty universal really. It could be like the hundred and one NYPD dramas you can see any night of the week from the comfort of your own tv-facing couch, except this is the grime behind the scenes, coloured by the characters’ tendency to reveal too much: letting themselves be carried away on lengthy, humorous, personal tirades, almost as if they’re thinking aloud except that there are always consequences to these indiscretions…

While there is plenty of hype – drama and suspense, heated notions of morality, murder, sex and violence – and plenty of laughs, this is not just light filler. Part farce, part straight-faced social commentary, there’s something to chew on: believable characters dealing with realistic problems.

Lonergan, accomplished playwright and screenwriter with plenty of notches in his belt, has a genuine concern for the everyday dilemmas of ordinary people and brings them to life in Lobby Hero with substance and humour. At any rate, whether you’re after colourful entertainment that doesn’t require too much thought, or something to go away and mull over, Lobby Hero will satisfy.

Caroline Bell Booth (who also directed Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth at the Silo in 2005) has successfully facilitated the thermodynamics between the characters with a robust hand. All in all, it’s a complementary blend of snappy, insightful dialogue, vivid acting and confident direction.  

It took a while to suspend disbelief with the accents, which were patchy – on the whole authentic (thanks to dialect coach Jacque Drew), but mauled by some incongruous kiwi vowels. I got used to this though, and ceased to be distracted by about 15 minutes in. Unavoidable, I suppose, in that this is an obviously New York story about the lives of some New York law enforcers. The most believable vernacular came courtesy of Colin Moy, as Bill.

In an unusual set-up, the stage area stretches along the length of the theatre, the seating forming an L around the set which, when I arrived and took a seat near the end of the front row, made me wonder if I might miss the full force of the action. However, the actors make good use of this space. Rachael Walker’s longish lobby set is a good platform for the numerous stand-offs and altercations that bring energy to the show, and maximises the intimacy of the space: the audience is in the thick of the action, eliminating for the back row folks that feeling of being perched up there spying on a miniature tableau.

All the characters are well fleshed-out, we get sufficient background on each through their advice to each other, excuses, gossip and self-promoting spiels. Jeff, the laid back doorman (Kip Chapman), bolstered by his boss’ show of confidence, exhibits a desire to stand on his own two feet and start being responsible. Although no hero (the title is somewhat ironic), he’s the catalyst of the story, naively drawing the other characters out of themselves and into the whirlpool of intrigue that ends in the inevitable break-downs and exposure of weaknesses.

Rookie cop Dawn (Fleur Saville) is struggling to reconcile her honourable intentions with the corruption and fraternising within the police force. Bill, the senior cop, always has an eloquent justification for making up his own rules, until they finally backfire (he’s sort of the bad guy, except that Lonergan doesn’t seem to do bad guys: everyone’s misguided, Bill’s the only one who’s not questioning his own motives, that’s all).

The upstanding but troubled supervisor, William, played with authenticity by Jarod Rawiri, must face the idea of compromising his usually unbending integrity.

By the end, all four have learnt something, though it’s not clear what they’re going to do about it – there’s nothing to suggest anyone’s really going to turn over a new leaf or take steps to resolve the problems they’ve been grappling with. But perhaps that’s just what this play is getting at: this is life, we’re given fleeting opportunities or thrust into situations and we have a choice about what we do with them.

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