E for Apple/Something Blue

Cancer is no picnic. In fact, it is very, very hard. It hurts and it makes you die, and dying is lonely – and hard.

This is about as much as you could possibly take away from E for Apple, a mercifully brief romance about two cancer patients who meet in a waiting room (for where else could strangers possibly meet?). Neglecting countless opportunities for gallows humour, the script surrenders to a string of increasingly melodramatic wailings (‘I’m a diseased carcass!’) that become so incessant they anaesthetise the viewer altogether.

Not only is poor, droning Aoife recovering from a mastectomy, it seems she has also lost control of her facial expressions; her counterpart, Adam, winces and perishes with all the pathos of a clown being kicked up the arse. Perhaps the worst thing about E for Apple is that this new offering from writing duo J.S. Hamilton (praised as ‘word perfect’ by the very tutors that trained them) is only half of a double bill.

Cue Something Blue, in which wholesome Angela’s pre-wedding butterflies are exacerbated when she meets her psychotic, home-wrecking sister-in-law for the first time. Their relationship is outrageously overplayed, flicking from inexplicable hostility to homoerotic fumbling with impossible haste and inspiring such lines as ‘punish me, Marty, I’ve been a bad girl!’ along the way. None of it makes an ounce of sense.

While amateur theatre should always be viewed with a lenient eye scouting for potential, this proves to be so bad that the audience has to be coaxed into applause by some generous soul backstage. Excruciating stuff.