Patience
Benedict Nightingale, The Times, 10 January 2005

When we meet Reuben, the protagonist of Jason Sherman’s play, he’s cheerfully cheating his way to triumph in a squash game, boasting of the cellphone company he helped to found, driving with carefree abandon through a Toronto whose smelliest streets represent "a city going forward" and generally exuding modern bonhomie — and when we leave him he’s lonely, bitter and talking like the sort of Beckett man who sums up existence in such epigrams as “birth was the death of him”.

Sherman is a young Canadian author with something in common with the David Mamet of Edmond, which is about the journey to disaster of an American Everyman, and something with his fellow-countryman Brad Fraser, who chronicled urban ennui brilliantly in plays such as Unidentified Human Remains and The True Nature of Love. But he’s more ambitious than either, since Reuben’s search is for what you, I and Monty Python would call the Meaning of Life.

That’s refreshing in itself, and speaks well for Activated Image, the enterprising and able company that is introducing Sherman to London.

It also produces plenty of short, vivid, Fraser-style scenes as Geoffrey Towers’s initially bouncy, eventually forlorn Reuben is rejected and (later) venomously denounced for his oppressive selfishness by his wife (Mufrida Hayes), gets fired from his job, and is clearly doomed to lose the one-time love-object he has rediscovered in middle age. But the feeling grows that Sherman has bitten off, not exactly more than he can chew, but so much that the sound of his desperately chomping teeth gets enervating.

What went wrong? Was there a point — an unwise kiss, for instance — that started this destructive chain of events? Can malign events be retrospectively fixed, can people change? Is there free will, fate, God? The questions that pile up aren’t pretentiously or ponderously put, though the references to chaos theory, uncertainty principles and the butterfly whose wings cause far-off disasters do begin to pall. And, as the director Adam Barnard suggests in the programme, the confusion — there are flashbacks, doublings and treblings of roles, even a ghost comes to ask big, challenging questions of Reuben — does express the messiness of life as Sherman sees it.

But for all the excellence of Towers and the versatility of his fellow actors, the play starts to seem long, cluttered and overconfident of the inherent interest of its antihero. I found myself asking if I cared about the predicament of this self-absorbed, self-pitying, floundering bloke as he made the worst of everything, from women and love to Toronto and life, and heard myself answering: not quite enough.

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