The Flick, National Theatre, review: 'Studiedly downbeat but strangely uplifting'

Annie Baker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning off-Broadway play is studiedly downbeat but strangely uplifting. We sit positioned as if we are the cinema screen in this faded Massachusetts flea-pit. The back-to-front focus has built-in bathos and pathos, giving us funny/sad access to the understatedly desperate lives of a trio of employees. Two male ushers make awkward small talk and indulge in the movie-nut game of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” as they lethargically mop the floor, sweep up the stray popcorn and gouge gum from the dingy seats. They are periodically joined by Rose who has the coveted job of projectionist. But the days of traditional celluloid are numbered as the digital world hammers at the door.

The play arrives here with a reputation for polarizing audiences less for its length (three and a quarter hours) than for what some perceived to be its glacial progression. The Pinter pause is a tiny crack compared to the gulfs of outright silence into which Baker’ s trio subside as they go about their banal routines, struggle to communicate, and form a love-triangle of sorts. But Sam Gold’s exquisitely paced production (imported from New York) offers decisive proof that the piece takes its time with real dramatic purpose. The unhurried rhythms and slowly accumulated detail allow our empathy for the characters and our appreciation of the social changes they typify to grow at a rate that never feels forced, condescending, or agenda-driven.

The crack cast balance the excruciating comedy and aching melancholy in wonderfully nuanced performances. Matthew Maher is perfection as blue-collar Sam, a stickler for protocol who's touchy about his stalled status and drifting towards forty with a hopeless slow-burn crush on Louisa Krause’s intimidating but insecure Rose. She’s more interested, though, in Jaygann Ayeh’s geeky, repressed Avery, a middle-class black youth on a break from college. For this obsessive cinephile, the difference watching a film shot in 35 millimetre and a digital transfer is the difference between looking at the original Mona Lisa and a postcard reproduction.

The authentic registration of light and shade that he pines for can be found here in the closely observed tragicomic texture of the situations. Rose's botched bid to seduce Avery while they are watching The Wild Bunch, for example, begins with her mad, toe-curling hip-hop dance, moves through crippling embarrassment, and concludes in a kind platonic tenderness of shared intimacies (he reveals that it’s the first anniversary of his suicide attempt). If movies are an escape, it’s the flea pit itself that has become a refuge to these lost souls. Until...but that would be telling. A touching, hypnotic antidote to our attention-deficit culture.

To 15 June; 020 7452 3000