There’s an awful lot going on in this play. This production is kind enough to stick an interval in – when Polar Bears premiered in 2010 at the Donmar Warehouse, directed by Jamie Lloyd (then Associate Director at the Donmar), it was one of those ninety-minute no-interval shows. If writing about what you know is the playwright’s mantra, Mark Haddon has lived experience of living with bipolar disorder, as does Kay (Kim Featherstone), around whom the storyline is centred. In some ways, it’s a very honourable thing to revive a play about mental health at a time when it is all the rage (and when you look at the world in 2025, it’s hardly surprising that people’s psychological wellbeing is not exactly tickety-boo).
Polar Bears at The White Bear Theatre
This particular play, though, doesn’t start at the beginning and doesn’t finish at the end, and in between, bounces around the play’s fairly longitudinal timeline. Kay, a children’s author, falls in love with John (Stephen Trowbridge), a philosophy lecturer. The audience is even treated (or subjected) to both a children’s story and a philosophy lecture, accordingly, presumably to underline this. For me, there’s more fun to be had in a philosophy class, if only because one gets to ask, “Question everything? Why?” and go from there.
The trouble is that such is Kay’s mental state that the creative juices sometimes overflow, and the lines between reality and make-believe are not so much blurred but erased. There’s a reason why Jesus (Nicholas Gauci) appears to her and not to any other character. Kay’s brother, Sandy (Ciaran Duce), is one of those business executives who thinks that to care about the bottom line is to care for people, in the sense that providing people with livelihoods wouldn’t be possible without profit. These are all rather complex characters, but Sandy was also, for me, highly contradictory, practically denying the reality of Kay’s mental ill health whilst also attempting to put John off continuing a relationship with Kay, because of her apparent mental condition.
Completing the set of on-stage characters is Margaret (Pamela Hall), Kay’s mother, a pragmatist at heart whose husband died by being taken by his own hand. The play, then, is rather too successful at portraying a depressing family life, and elsewhere, there was more academic name-dropping than was strictly necessary. I thought Kay’s mood swings could have been a little more, well, moodier: granted, she snaps at John to “f— off” at one point, but John’s actions at the end of the story (with which, strangely, the play kicks off with) don’t seem commensurate with his general persona. This is a man who practises his philosophy – never taking any action without having carefully considered the pros and cons – so to act on impulse was difficult to fathom.
Some elements of the dialogue felt unnecessary – there were references to Oslo that didn’t seem to actually go anywhere, and a description of the stages of human decay post-death, which didn’t say anything that isn’t already in the Wikipedia page for ‘corpse decomposition’ (yes, I looked it up on the Tube home). A hardworking cast does their best to deliver a highly convoluted script in a show that resulted in more questions than answers.
Review by Chris Omaweng
“Talking means nothing. Not until you’ve seen it. not until you’ve been there.”
John has never met anyone like Kay. When the moon is in the right phase, she is magnetic and amazingly alive. But when the darkness closes in, she is lost to another world, a world in which John does not belong.
Ciaran Duce – Sandy
Kim Featherstone – Kay
Pamela Hall – Margaret
Stephen Trowbridge – John
Nicholas Gauci – Jesus
Written by Mark Haddon
Directed by Jo Romero
Aaron Blackledge – Light & Sound
Yas Trowbridge – Assistant Technician / Operator
POLAR BEARS
White Bear Theatre
28 to 30 August 2025
