Love comes round for a chat – Hold, Please

“You’re not performing. We are.” says the lyrical prologue to the devised hour of delight Hold, Please. For a show made of short, concentrated scenes, I left the FAB feeling I’ve been served a full theatrical meal. Following four characters (Clemmie Mayhew, Max Green, Bea Kelly, George Jasper, Thomas Sykes) grappling with everyday moments, from awkward introductions to train delays to waiting on the titular irritating dialling message, Hold, Please packs plenty into its only hour-long performance. The play is a new, devised piece from Warwick’s Codpiece theatre. Taken from the experience and imagination of both the actors and the production team, the stories are diverse in tone, but all connect to the mundane montage of life as a young person.  

Director and Co-writer Lucas Agudo tells The Boar: “Directing this show has been an absolute honour. Surrounded by a cast and crew that is wickedly talented, on top of being so wonderfully kind, has resulted in some of the best memories I could have asked for. I’ll miss it for a long time – but of course, missing something is just remembering the love you have for it. Hold, Please is an attempt. An attempt to communicate a vast range of thoughts, concerns and beliefs that our team shares, the kind of thoughts that keep me up at night yet are the reason I get up in the morning. And I hope that our attempt inspires our audience to look at the world just a little bit differently. To look at a bus stop as a stage for human interaction. At a train platform as a canvas. At a bench in the rain as a reminder of childhood memories.” 

Love is a present thing on stage, something always moving around in the air. The play suggests that life is packed with contradictions, and that’s okay. The characters rant and rave, shouting into a phone, an empty holding line, and by doing this, they fill the space. If you stop for a minute and take a breath, love comes round for a chat. Whether it’d be two strangers enjoying a moment on a park bench during a rain shower or somebody chatting to a train attendant, the show states that these little stops are great.  

 This is where the play finds its core. Love is a hard thing to knock down, and that courage only needs simple gestures … these brief personal moments are clear, precise and sweet, creating something universal that can appeal to diverse audiences

My favourite and perhaps the most touching moment is where a character worries sick about not calling her brother, guilt hovering over her for fear of losing such a vital connection. She finally musters up the courage, calls him and gets a company voicemail. She vows to try again. This is where the play finds its core. Love is a hard thing to knock down, and that courage only needs simple gestures. More socially aware, even political content could be shown in this form. And yet these brief personal moments are clear, precise and sweet, creating something universal that can appeal to diverse audiences.   

Co-writer Olly Cornish speaks: “Working on Hold, Please for the last six months and more has been an absolute odyssey of living in the moment. From late-night phone calls to bustling tube stations, from woodland walks to sweltering rehearsal rooms, we have tried to capture what it means to be present in the here and now. We’ve mainly focused on staging our own experience, showcasing the simple joys of people watching and questioning the constant demands of the modern attention economy. It’s also been fantastic to come back to the script after a few months to edit it down, make it tighter, add in new material in preparation for the Camden Fringe later this year. We hope that the audience leaves without rushing instantly to somewhere else.” 

Hold, Please is less character, more situation. And yet the clashing sides that these characters carry are ones that we all hold. Printing the audience a license to feel vulnerable. Letting all the little awkward slights and mishearings out, clears our too many muddled minds.  The show may be about shouting into a barrel, short bursts of little consequence that fill up a day. And yet these stops are a lot of fun, especially with the stellar improvisational skills that the actors show off.  

It’s the kind of show that you could perform anywhere. Here’s hoping that the Camden fringe will lead to bigger stages for this play to shine on 

The late great Anthony Bourdain once said that if he had any single advice for anybody, it would be to move, as far as you can, as much as you can. This show presents something similar. All the characters are moving all the time: to catch a train, dancing in the club, dancing in a flat kitchen, or even losing it in a sassy AI-controlled elevator. Even the show itself is constantly morphing its form and content, a great example being when two characters on either side of the stage start making up voices for characters from an earlier scene. It’s the kind of show that you could perform anywhere. Here’s hoping that the Camden fringe will lead to bigger stages for this play to shine on.