Meet Rek. Real name Derek. But don’t call him that if you want to keep your limbs, mate.
Rek has built a life out of posturing: a party animal, womaniser and grime producer living “pretty much in Croydon, bruv”. In truth, he works in a Surrey care home, gets rejected from open mics and feels lost. He finds connection with Zofia, a cheeky Polish woman living with dementia. When Rek breaks her out to fulfil her final wish, the pair embark on a chaotic journey across London that forces them to confront who they are becoming.
Blending grime, classical music, and spoken word, GETTING REKT is an urgent one-man play about identities lost, performed and reclaimed. Through an intergenerational friendship, it examines the crisis of masculinity, invisible care work and what remains of us when memory and the personas built to protect us begin to fall away.
Review by Richard Lambert
Writer and performer Jamie Nowski brings his new play Getting Rekt to the Union Theatre for just five performances. It’s a lot of work for a five-performance run.
The production also benefits from musicians and a composer who is also an exceptional sound designer. Although the musicians are not performing live, everything has been mixed down into tracks for the show.
The soundscape is as carefully constructed as one could imagine, with the right sound effects, drones, compositions and songs coming in at exactly the right level and at just the right moment. Everything feels meticulously curated.
Jamie’s play is brave, drawing on his personal experiences of working in a care and assisted living home. As a one-man play, we learn about the clients and colleagues through Derek’s conversations and reported dialogue, with Jamie playing all of the other characters.
His acting skills are second to none, and he brings a real depth and humanity to each character. At times, however, the staging of the different characters can be slightly confusing, particularly when the role changes happen too quickly for him to reposition himself on stage. Despite this, the strength of the acting and the story remains powerful and heartfelt.
Some of the lighting is spot-on, while other sections feel compromised. It is always challenging when working with a venue’s own in-house rig, particularly when the rig has not been set up carefully in terms of symmetry and spacing. The side-light LED strips are particularly frustrating, as they become more of a visible distraction than an effective source of side light.
A few hours of ladder work to adjust and rebalance the rig would go a long way towards improving the overall look of the show. However, I suspect this production simply did not have the luxury of that amount of technical time.
The story has some parallels with the film Gerontophilia, although without the element of sexual desire. As Derek’s experiences unfold, we find ourselves on a journey alongside both him and one of his clients. It is a story that is both moving and heartbreaking.
Photo credit: Miranda Mazzarella
Rek: Jamie Nowski
Director: Finella Waddilove
Original Music Design / Sound Designer: Jack Bales
Producer: Teryn Gray
Producer: Wicked Thistle Productions
Voice & Dialect Coach: Helena Fox
Technical Designer: Dylan Lowe
Photographer: Zoë Birkbeck
Poster Designer: Christine Fitzgerald
Tickets: Click here