Annie Baker's The Flick

In Annie Baker’s The Flick, now on at the National Theatre, we watch people watching movies. The play begins in darkness, a point of light radiating out over the audience, the whirring of a projector the only sound. When it stops, and the lights are raised, we see rows of empty cinema seats staring blankly back at us.

For the next three hours, we follow snatches of conversation from Sam (Matthew Maher), Rose (Louisa Krause) and newcomer Avery (Jaygann Ayeh), three of the cinema’s employees, as they clean up dropped popcorn from between the aisles. They discuss their wages, their taste in movies, their star signs, and even – occasionally – heavier topics like their families or mental health. The three actors develop that particular silent intimacy that comes from spending many hours with someone, without actually sharing much about each other’s lives. The drama that unfolds seems both trivial and profound: from Avery’s dilemma over whether to join in with an illegal activity, to his letter to their boss asking that he keep using one of the state’s only remaining 35mm projectors. (Sam: “It’s like something someone would write in a movie.”)

In movies, we see the wave after wave of everything. In The Flick, we see even more of nothing – long, drawn out pauses, sometimes funny, sometimes excruciating, sometimes contemplative. There are several moments in the play that make me squirm (when Sam says of his brother, “He’s retarded”, and the audience laugh, what, or who, is the punchline?), but it feels the closest to real speech the stage can