Jamie Oxenbould and Di Adams in Trevor. Photo: Clare Hawley.
Trevor has tasted potential stardom – he appeared in a pilot with a celebrity called Morgan Fairchild – and now, as an adult actor, he is hungry for fame. All he needs is a break, right? Mom Sandra is his greatest supporter. So far, so ordinary – there are a lot of aspiring actors around. Except that Trevor was no ordinary child actor; Trevor is a chimpanzee, and he is growing bigger and stronger all the time.
Welcome to Outhouse Theatre Co’s production of Nick Jones’s very funny but also poignant play which, says director Shaun Rennie, asks us to examine our ability to truly communicate – with our parents, our children, our neighbours and, just as importantly in this case, with ourselves. It’s more than that though. Trevor is also a play that skewers ambition and fame, and revisits the nature versus nurture debate alongside experiments with raising chimps as humans.
It reminded me of Karen Joy Fowler’s novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, but Trevor was born of Jones’ fascination with the real-life story of a chimp called Travis and his mother/carer Sandra. That didn’t end so well, but luckily for us Jones’ play doesn’t take us there. It’s much more upbeat and quite often hilarious, before bringing down the humour with some thought-provoking climactic scenes.
Jamie Oxenbould is magnetising as a chimp, his movements and gestures at once redolent of our nearest genetic neighbours as well as us humans. Ambitious, petulant, sad, misunderstood, exuberant – all these moods and more do we get from Oxenbould’s Trevor.
The play starts with Sandra’s neighbour Ashley (Ainslie McGlynn) coming to complain to Sandra (Di Adams) that Trevor has been driving her car again and has crashed it into her lawn. She’s upset. She would be!
Adams as single parent Sandy, who has only Trevor left to love and nurture, is equally believable. Blind to her charge’s shortcomings, she is a wildly defensive mom and desperate to let Ashley and the local cop Jim (David Lynch) know that it’s just an aberration, Trevor’s OK, and that their worries are unfounded. He’s a clever boy, he can drink wine from a stemmed glass, after all! He just needs some herbal tea to calm him down.
Trevor, meanwhile is obsessed with Morgan Fairchild (Eloise Snape), the glitzy TV hostess who mesmerised him as a baby chimp and who he is convinced, quite erroneously, holds the key to his successful future. Watching Snape’s Fairchild go through her vocal warm-up exercises, which Trevor thinks are a homage to him, is just one of many laugh-out-loud moments – and a prime example of miscommunication – in a very entertaining 90 minutes of theatre.
Oliver (Garth Holcombe) is Trevor’s alter ego. He’s brilliant, and not only because he wears a white sparkly suit and tux. Holcombe’s Oliver has made it in showbiz. He resides in Florida, with his human wife and their three half-human children. He’s living the dream – and he is full of advice for Trevor. To stay relevant, he tells him, ‘You have to behave! You have to!’, and goes through a litany of must-nots, which start with Trevor not knocking Jim’s coffee cup out of his hand, and get funnier and funnier.
While Oxenbould is a standout, everyone in this cast makes the most of their roles. Along with Oxenbould, Holcombe and Snape have the best comic moments, but Adams’ hopelessly devoted Sandra works really well on a different level as she approaches her maternal nightmare.
Highly recommended. Until 6 July.
