Maxine Peake in On the Third Day

The centre of gravity for new plays has long shifted away from the West End toward the subsidised houses, both inside and outside of London, that specialise in new writing and offer writers the benefit of a process by which their work can be nurtured and grow. A one-off attempt to see if it’s possible to bring a previously unproduced playwright back to the West End—under the watchful gaze of Channel 4 television cameras in the series The Play’s The Thing—has shone a compelling light on the backstage process of trying to choose one to put on from an artificially produced pool of over 2,000 entrants who applied.

Now that they have done so, the result is also, outside of the departing Embers at the Duke of York’s and Tom Stoppard’s latest Rock ‘n’ Roll that will soon transfer from the Royal Court to replace it there, shockingly the sole new play playing in the West End right now.

But far from validating the effort, Kate Betts’ winning entry On the Third Day only accentuates the difficulties of finding the needle of a good play in the haystack of those submitted. You find yourself asking that if this is the best they can come up with, it’s no wonder that there’s such a paucity of unknown writers getting commercial attention.

Betts’ play is nothing if not ambitious in its bold and frequent shifts of location and time—the action sweeps from such locations as the planetarium at Greenwich’s Royal Observatory to an underground cave that two characters abseil into—but it is also too densely layered and fractured to engage the heart as well as the mind. As a mature student, Betts studied for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Chichester (and now teaches there as an associate lecturer), and though she supplies plenty of creative imagination, her play fatally lacks dramatic tension.

The disjointed play centers on the triangular relationships of Claire (Maxine Peake), a 30-year-old woman prone to bouts of self-harming and her 27-year-old brother Robbie (Tom McKay) that she has been estranged from for the last five years, and the man that reunites them who she met in a bar and may be the reincarnation of Jesus (Paul Hilton).

All three actors bring an admirable conviction and commitment to these complex characters, and no budding playwright could hope to be better served than by the professional cast fielded here. Director Robert Delamere harnesses the play’s constantly shifting shapes and sizes into something organic even as it flies off in all sorts of directions at once that are also neatly evoked in Mark Thompson’s sleek, slick sets and Jon Driscoll’s atmospheric projections that stretch from sea to sky.

On the Third Day
By Kate Betts
Directed by Robert Delamere
New Ambassadors Theatre