Spare Room
Spare Room is a darkly dramatic and acerbic portrait of house share life amid a never-ending blur of booze, bravado and boy-banter as a daily hazing ritual.
The cast is uniformly strong, with standout performances from Tom David Griffiths (Ben), Matt Underhill (Jack) and Luke Dyer in a scene-stealing turn as the endearingly put-upon Mary. Founder and writer Sam Dinnage also gives a smaller, but notably skin-crawling performance, as Callum, the household's almost-resident red flag.
With its roots in nineties and noughties shows like Game On and Skins, Spare Room takes the 'twenty-somethings behaving badly' model and cranks the co-dependent, incestuous claustrophobia up to eleven. Sharp scene cuts keep pace with Jodie's unravelling world, whiplashing between laugh-along funny and increasingly unsettling. Swaggering, arrogant Callum and "it's different for boys" man-whore Alex act as decoys for the eventual bait and switch, while self-deprecating, self-confessed alcoholic Jack becomes the canary in the coal mine for Jodie's eventual gut-punch revelation.
While the manic, grungey, sex-obsessed chaos is for the most part very entertaining (hats and everything else off to Tom David Griffiths on that front by the way) it's dialled up so high, so early, and continues so relentlessly that the character beats don't always get enough room to breathe. It's in the quieter moments - Alex and Mary playing Minecraft, Jack and Jodie talking - where they feel most human, briefly glimpsed outside of the booze-and-blow bacchanalia they're using as a personality. I have no problem with material where everyone is irredeemably awful, but I didn’t get the impression that was the intention here, more that they are flawed young people terrified of looking foolish in front of each other. Which is not to say that their actions are excusable simply by virtue of youth, more that they are real things that, sadly, happen frequently to real people. A touch more space for the nuance to come through amid the noise may have helped to land what is an already gutsy and sharply observed piece.
This is a strong piece of original writing, however, with a uniformly enjoyable cast to propel it, and I would certainly recommend Spare Room to anyone familiar with the particular hell that is sharing a flat whilst drowning in British binge-drink culture.
★★★.5
