PHobie Eclair-Powell’s disturbing new play is defined by dislocation. This is because she overlays conversations in the broken exchanges between her three central couples: Abi and Mark, her student lovers. Lil and Tony were married several times. And the generation in between, Naomi and Frank. The conversation abruptly switches from one pairing to another, echoing and interrupting, and does not settle down for long.
This also lies in the way Eclair Powell relates to time. The movement follows a roughly chronological timeline, starting with a New Year’s kiss in early 1994, through marriages, births, illnesses, and pandemic isolation, to the present day. But time is also fragmented, with the story looping back and forth to show similarities and reveal secrets.
The effect is amplified by Atri Banerjee’s sharp, fluid direction, which runs on three concentric circles on Naomi Dawson’s set, each rotating at its own pace, with scene titles written in chalk on the floor. He shows the accumulated weight of the work. past. Seemingly innocuous interactions, the mundane occurrences of domestic relations, begin to take on a menacing edge in this collage of love and loss. As the tension between the characters increases, Banerjee places the actors at odd angles and estranged distances.
The formal disconnect between script and direction is an expression of the playwright’s dark purpose. At the center of the play are three women in the 2019 Brantwood Prize winner, none of whom are in charge of their own destinies. Naomi (Lizzie Watts) fills her garden shed with symbols of her life that has spiraled out of control. Abi (Nora Lopez Holden) is her daughter, who is being coerced by her husband (Michael Workay) in a short fuse without her knowledge. Lil (Hayley Carmichael) is a survivor who tries to warn young women not to repeat her own mistakes, but she is in vain.
The violence in their lives is largely invisible until it manifests itself as a horrific attack. With Jason Hughes and Will Johnson rounding out the cast as Frank and Tony, the female partners come across as rational and attractive people, and they believe they are just that. The women have no words to describe the man’s hidden power, only an unspoken anger exacerbated by the fragments of memory that swirl in the play, which is as subtle as it is unstable.
