ajhlovestheatre

THE GIFT

by Dave Florez 

directed by Adam Meggido

Park Theatre, London – until 1 March 2025

running time: 2 hours 15 minutes including interval

https://parktheatre.co.uk/event/the-gift/

How would you react if you received a massive poo by post from an anonymous sender? That’s the starting point for Dave Florez’s snappy comedy, a merry three hander that begins in a state of amusing revulsion and ends up being an entertaining, if not particularly deep, look at sibling relationships in early middle age and what happens when a marriage loses its sheen. 

The Gift is populated by the sort of sweary, affluent North Londoners (the loss of a table reservation in a Crouch End sushi restaurant is the source of almost as much consternation as the origin of the offending turd in the first scene) you might expect to find in the audience at the Park Theatre, although it also feels like the sort of script and production that would have played for years in the West End a couple of decades ago. With its bourgeois characters antagonising each other but fundamentally being full of mutual affection beneath the surface irritations, it reminded me a little of Yasmina Reza’s long running Art. 

However, where the catalyst for that stroppy trio being at each other’s throats was an all white modern painting, here it’s an excremental MacGuffin in a patisserie box that spurs self-obsessed advertising exec Colin (Nicholas Burns) into paroxysms of navel-gazing while the tensions in the marriage of his sister (Laura Haddock) to his best friend (Alex Price) are exposed. It’s pretty slight but a lot of fun, and Adam Meggido’s crisp staging, played out on Sara Perks’s suitably soulless urban kitchen-cum-living room set, thrums along persuasively, though I’m not convinced it would be quite so satisfying, or plausible, without such a tremendous cast. 

Florez’s creations aren’t bad people but nor are they entirely good, and it’s in those grey areas that the majority of the play’s dramatic meat is to be found, as well as some tangy psychological insights. Burns and Haddock make convincing siblings: he, boisterously unruly and emotionally incontinent while she is warm but incisive with an intriguing mean streak. Price makes something sharp, funny and relatable out of the blustering, opinionated sweetheart stuck in the middle of them, whose attempts to resolve a tricky situation don’t go according to plan.

Florez’s dialogue is smart and nicely turned, provoking chuckles rather than uproarious laughter perhaps, and I doubt I would have bought into the play’s premise (would somebody even as hysterical as Colin really devote so much time to hunting down past loves and foes to discover who might be his toilet-based tormentor?!) if the acting weren’t so good. It ends on a sweet, uplifting note that feels fitting for a comedy that is ultimately less outrageous than it thinks it is. The Gift is a sharp, cute, engaging piece of theatre that probably won’t linger long in the memory but makes for a thoroughly diverting night out that’s likely to be extremely popular.