How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found

Everything in its Right Place

How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found

by Fin Kennedy

The Questors at the Questors Studio, Ealing until 21^st September  

Review by Andrew Lawston

Opening with a series of vignettes about people who suddenly walked away from their lives, never to be seen again, How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found deals with a sensitive and under-reported topic, the 100,000-250,000 people reported missing in the UK each year.

The sparse staging of the play’s opening moments is deceptive – Juliette Demoulin’s set quickly becomes a character in its own right as flats are wheeled on and off stage by the cast at speed, spinning to reveal wardrobes, offices, and a towering toilet!  The set is completed by photo and video projections against one of the flats.  With a props list that must also have comprised several pages, the whole production is deftly handled by the cast and stage manager Evan Rule.

It’s difficult for an audience member of a certain age to see a title like How To Disappear Completely and Never be Found, and not immediately wonder whether there is any connection to the song of a very similar name on Radiohead’s 2000 album, Kid A.  Luckily, the programme clarifies that both Fin Kennedy’s play and the Radiohead track take their titles from Kennedy’s earlier non-fiction book by the same name.

Director Steve Fitzpatrick sensibly leans into the association, featuring several tracks from that album to accompany the breakdown of Charlie, a young advertising executive, and his attempts to begin a new life.  The result is an angst-laden drama that, for all the updating of prices and cultural references, feels firmly rooted in the early noughties.  Charlie’s monologues share some DNA with similar parts of Fight Club, or Trainspotting, and that same jet black humour underscores this play.

Charlie, played with huge gusto by Pascal Orzabal, has recently lost his mother, and carries her ashes around with him.  He works inhumanly long hours in advertising (“How many hours have you worked this month?” the company doctor asks.  “All of them?” he replies, confused), and has a cocaine habit, owing a five figure sum to a local drug dealer (Matt Cranfield, in one of a number of colourful “geezer” roles).  When his precarious life unravels further after a chaotic New Year’s Eve party, he flees London to call on Mike.

James Goodden plays small-time criminal Mike with enormous relish, clearly having a great deal more fun than his additional roles as Charlie’s boss, or the wonderfully gloomy Lost Property officer.  Mike walks Charlie through the necessary stages to shed his old life, and to become Adam.  This is where the play’s title becomes extremely literal, at the opening of the second act, as Mike takes Charlie, now Adam through the various stages of constructing a new life with entertainingly blunt pragmatism.

Adam doesn’t seem to enjoy himself much more than Charlie did, and quickly finds himself falling back into familiar patterns.  He tries to lie his way into rehab where Kerala McGrail’s briskly professional nurse quickly sees through him.

By the play’s conclusion, we realise we have met all the characters whose brief stories we heard in the opening moments, all of them faintly lost souls like Charlie-Adam.  That Charlie meets a bad end is therefore almost inevitable, and certainly not a spoiler.  He meets his own pathologist at a party early on (Erin Stavrianos, who is arguably less visible than some of the cast, but who makes the most of every moment she is on stage).  When surprised that the London Underground lost property office can receive a mobile phone signal, he’s told he’s “six feet under”.  And so on, and so forth.

With its committed performances, taut direction, hypnotic Radiohead soundtrack and characters who seem heightened often to the point of absurdity, How to Disappear Completely… often feels like an adventure in existentialism of which Albert Camus would be proud.  With Charlie faking his own death and starting a new life only to be disappointed, however, not to mention the thread of dark humour that bubbles under its surface, it’s hard not to think of it to some extent as a Generation X Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.

Whether you see shades of Leonard Rossitter in Pascal Orzabal’s energetic central performance, or more of Edward Norton’s Narrator from Fight Club in his darkly comic monologues on modern life, How to Disappear Completely and Never be Found is a compelling, thought-provoking and often darkly hilarious play which demands that the audience engage with it fully, and will stay with them long after the final bow.

Andrew Lawston, September 2024

Photography by Jane Arnold-Forster