The Pride – Side Pony Productions

Overview

The Pride opens with a good murder, and spends the rest of its running time waiting for the next. It plays out a cruel dining-room drama about failure, usurpation and suburban masculinity, wrapped in the absurd, animal tension that its actors are all in lion onesies.

Lion Bruce (Brendan Ewing) is a murderer. And at the same time, clumsy, inadequate, unsuccessful and living in the suburbs. He seems to start the play by usurping a previous alpha male lion's place in the affections of fellow lion Linda (Adriane Daff). The two bounce around an '80s-era domestic kitchen, excited at their newfound domesticity and new, joint answering machine message. But his pride of place doesn't look like it will last for long.

The play's miniature world of creepy domesticity and big-cat dynamics blur as a litter of cubs brings with it the prospect of Linda's sisters moving in for child-minding duties. Linda demands Bruce renovate the house. And he, in turn, constantly demurs from this blokey duty, in a show of both ineffectiveness and reluctance.

Enter James (Russell Leonard), new lion in the neighbourhood. He sees himself at first as the enthusiastic new apprentice to this elder lion. But Bruce seems to know what happens with old male lions, and feels more and more threatened as the play rolls on and he himself begins to age. James is merely needy, but Linda's disappointment feeds Bruce's resentment of the new interloper.

Despite their posturing and enthusiasm, none of these lions are particularly cool. Social climbers at best — the 'pride'; in the title isn't about collective nouns — each draws a sense of importance from the others to try to fit in their lion world. These are dork lions, obsessed with consumer products, like clap-on light fittings. And what starts as a dorky comedy gets its sense of foreboding from its lion suits and the constant tension around when their animal instincts will re-emerge.

As you wait, director Zoe Pepper seems to favour the identities the characters project a bit more than what they're feeling, while Nathan Nisbet's sound and Lucy Birkinshaw's lighting sit neatly with the production in simple yet effective understatement. Esther Sandler has also created some appropriately expressive onesies. In fact, what would be a darker play is by turns sad or funny because: lions.

But, given this story's darker theme, with its protagonists' posturing and suffering played more for comedy than for sympathy, it would have been great to get to more murder in a little earlier in the evening.

Photo by Skye Sobejko.