The Telegraph
5 stars out of 5
This clever satire of modern feminism might well be the best new play of the year
Bush Theatre’s excellent show Paradise Now! skewers the Instagram generation’s obsession with authenticity as a substitute for female power
What an unexpected end of year treat this is – a strange, lovely, fresh as paint new satire that’s surely a late contender for best new play of the year. A group of four women of various backgrounds, ages and ethnicities have been brought together by the lucrative allure of Paradise Now!: a franchise-style commercial sales “community” involving the flogging of £30 essential oils promising “happiness and balance” to the public, invariably female.
Members are ranked on their selling abilities; the company prides itself on only hiring “dedicated ferocious women” to generate profits and increase recruitment. When Alex, the slick, gushy team leader of this particular group, posts a YouTube video showing how Essential Maintenance oil calmed her down following a panic attack, her sales go through the roof.
Like a Top Girls for today’s “self empowerment” generation, this offbeat comedy from Irish writer Margaret Perry is a beautifully sly take down of a particularly insidious modern feminism that has somehow persuaded itself that the language of “authenticity”, “self-belief” and “sharing” is a meaningful substitute for actual female power.
Our four women are desperate to embrace authenticity and belief too. Gabriel, an older, devout Irish loner who lives with her beloved sister, Baby, is crippled by inadequacy, although she ends up being a surprise Paradise Now! success story. Carla, black [as specified in the casting notes], gay and whom we are invited to regard as extremely attractive, is determined to be rich at all costs.
Laurie, a 30-something hot mess whose sales technique relies somewhat hopelessly on the phone book, is desperately in debt. Yet, played with delicious skittish charisma by Sex Education’s Rakhee Thakrar, Laurie also has an unerring handle on what exactly is going on. “How did you take your pain and use it like that, Alex?” she asks sceptically, referring to the video. “It’s literally valuable.”
In other words, Paradise Now! nails the ruthless commodification of feminine “vulnerability” as its own highly lucrative brand – something you could argue a certain former US actress is particularly skilled at doing. What sets Perry’s critique of this depressingly self-deluding new feminism apart, though, is its tone. There is nothing declamatory or heavy-handed here; rather Perry blends her satirical nous with an offbeat naturalism flecked with moments of startling surreal humour.
She’s found a match made in heaven, too, in director Jaz Woodcock-Stewart, who accentuates the play’s discomforting mood-shifts with deadpan comic flourishes, moments of near unbearable poignancy and a terrific cast who work together in perfect harmony. At one point the group attempts to create a human pyramid as part of a team-building exercise, which collapses as soon as it’s forced to bear actual weight. An excellent metaphor.
The Stage
4 stars out of 5
“Smart, funny, heart-bruising”
Sharply funny look at female friendships and the lure of success
Working for Paradise isn’t for everyone, Alex solemnly announces to Gabriel as she tries to sign her up for the pyramid scheme she represents, flogging essential oils. It’s only for “a certain type of dedicated, ferocious woman”, she claims. Gabriel (Michele Moran), a cowed, depressed, unemployed Irishwoman who just wants to have the cash to “buy some sleep” for her overworked sister, Baby, looks very far from ferocious. But in Margaret Perry’s smart, funny, heart-bruising play, thoughtfully directed by Jaz Woodcock-Stewart, we watch as she seems to find her wings – in a strangely literal sense, thanks to the Angel Gabriel selling shtick she creates for her YouTube videos. She uses Paradise to turn her life round. Or does she?
Gabriel’s fellow sellers, the always Insta-ready 20-something Carla (Ayoola Smart) and the highly strung Laurie (Rakhee Thakrar), as well as the immaculately put-together, cliche-spouting Alex (Shazia Nicholls), are also struggling under the surface, something that comes to a head at the annual company conference, Paradise Now. While the whooping crowds at the Brighton conference centre are hailing their self-styled “She-E-O”, Alex and co’s team-building exercises take a dark turn.
Cork playwright Perry delves into female friendships, desperate ambition, exploitation, loneliness and grief with a deft touch as we watch pressures mount and carefully constructed shells crumble. She has a nimble way with dialogue and a beguiling line in humour, finding the laughs in quotidian exchanges and making well-aimed jabs at the slick marketing puffery and cult-like evangelism that Paradise comes cloaked in.
Woodcock-Stewart draws excellent performances from the cast. Moran’s quietly spoken Gabriel slowly but determinedly changes before our eyes, as she starts to see a way out of the hole she has been trapped in. Thakrar is alarmingly believable as a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, swinging from outrageous to stingingly savvy as she cuts to the heart of how problematic it is to sell products by using personal pain as a lure for social media likes. Nicholls lets Alex’s veneer of having-it-all composure slowly but surely blister before our eyes and burn away. Meanwhile, Annabel Baldwin is deliciously sceptical as Carla’s dancer girlfriend, Anthie, and Carmel Winters lets us see flashes of Baby’s steely interior even at her most put-upon, before rather triumphantly stripping off to have a bath on stage.
Winner of The Stage Debut Award in 2017, Rosie Elnile’s hardworking set allows scenes to merge and shift seamlessly. Some of the set pieces – Alex’s selling party, a bowling alley face-off, the ambitious requirement for the six actors to create a human pyramid – are built up well, only to peter out rather unsatisfactorily. But that’s a minor quibble. Perry’s careful character construction, sensitively realised here, leaves a lasting impression.
Whats on Stage
4 stars out of 5
Paradise Now! at the Bush Theatre – review
Margaret Perry’s new play opens in west London
In Paradise Now!, ambition is naked and it’s smelling good. This dark comedy about multi-level marketing has the punning fun with “essential oils” you’d hope. Both writer Margaret Perry and director Jaz Woodcock-Stewart have had great work on at the Bush before; this first collaboration together, with its bustlingly full set and running time of two hours and 45 minutes, is an unusual but welcome beast here.
Perry turns a clever eye to the eroticism of selling in an early scene where Gabriel (Michele Moran) is seduced into Paradise, an essential oils business aimed with empowerment-disguised positivity by women, at women. The unseen “She-E-O” designates it a “Fempire”. It’s a new world to Gabriel: she hasn’t tried anything in a long time. She spends her days quietly at home. The belief Alex (Shazia Nicholls) seems to have in her, that she can really sell this product, is enough to awaken something long dormant. What if she wants to succeed?
Great fun is had with the tension between competition and unity: as you’d expect, loneliness makes characters great prey for Paradise, but real, though shaky, companionship is found there too. Where do you find the line in the monetisable sand when selling to people online? While Carla (Ayoola Smart) hacks away at Paradise in lieu of a career as a TV presenter, lip synching to Drake and building those followers, her girlfriend Anthie (Annabel Baldwin) takes a more traditional tack, running to audition after audition, disappointment after disappointment.
The first time they hook up is while Carla’s roommate cries in the next room. “How do you know her?” Anthie asks; “I don’t really,” is the answer. Carla’s new to London from Cork and thought it would all be less of a struggle by now. At the heart of the play is a criticism of the indignity of all work, brilliantly illustrated by Gabriel’s sweet but solid sister Baby (Carmel Winters), who tells a story about a chair at her department store job which she isn’t allowed to sit in, lest she looks like she isn’t busy.
Each actor gets their moment to wring hearts or conquer. Nicholls’ hilarious Alex, who brings the other women in, is a breathy, vital go-getter who positively trembles with will, her every furious glance visible from the moon. Trawling through Facebook for connections to recruit into Paradise, she reels in Laurie (Rakhee Thakrar), who she barely remembers from school. Thakrar plays Laurie like a frayed edge, all uncoordinated limbs and no filter: she needs Paradise to work for her, but it’s this very desperation which seems to scupper her efforts.
Moran and Winters’ scenes as the sisters Gabriel and Baby are a delight – still recovering from (though not talking about) Gabriel’s lowest period the year before. The dynamic is cosy but mature: they’re life partners, with all the serious love and pain that entails.
There are echoes of Woodcock-Stewart’s much-beloved Civilisation in this production’s thoughtful populating and emptying of space, and spells of dance. In moments without dialogue, characters are often together onstage, alone but overlapping in their activities, maybe animated by a similar faith. Rosie Elnile’s design extrapolates all the play’s locations out from the cheap wooden panelling of the hotel setting of Paradise Now, the scheme’s annual conference, with stage managers and actors tirelessly moving furniture and manipulating doors and panels.
It’s a tremendously busy and demanding approach which allows for all kinds of surprises (bowling, to spoil but one) though it does contribute to a squashed feeling, especially with the stage set up end-on. It’s far more common to see main house Bush productions in the round, and some lines and details are lost for those seated furthest away from the action.
Alex Fernandes’ wise lighting expands the world out with plush gorgeous colour, and uses an awesome, sun-like glow to achieve a sense of unearthly pleasure when Laurie essentially ODs on oils, slumped and stinking (she’s fine). The costumes throughout are smartly conceived by design associate Hazel Low and made by Ruth Best: when Moran as Gabriel, beaming and with her hair down, comes out to lead a dance in her carefully-chosen pink suit for Paradise Now, it makes the heart kick.
There’s a shimmery score by Jasmin Kent Rodgman, as well as lots of pop needledrops, which together with Sung Im Her’s movement direction (big shapes, often balletic for Anthie, a dancer) gives us the gift of Baldwin dancing to “Immaterial” by SOPHIE.
The plot doesn’t take its characters to many unexpected places (besides that outsiders Anthie and Baby aren’t the ones to put up challenges about Paradise) and speeds through some arcs, but though the play feels slightly unwieldy, it’s also a blast: confidently energetic and quiet in turn.