SWALLOW
Isaac Theatre Royal, The Gloucester Room, Christchurch
15/03/2017 - 18/03/2017
Production Details
Winner of a 2015 Fringe First and the Scottish Arts Club Theatre Award
Christchurch independent theatre group A Little Box At The Top Of The Stairs – under the direction of founder Garry Thomas – is back at Isaac Theatre Royal’s Gloucester Room with another dramatic installment.
Three strangers are about to face their demons head on. They might just be able to save one another if they can only overcome their urge to self-destruct.
Three women inhabit a hostile world. Chirpy Anna hasn’t left home for months; she’s stopped eating and she is smashing her flat up bit by bit. Rebecca is so furious that her ex-partner has found a new love that she turns that anger on herself. Samantha is struggling to become Sam, to look in the mirror and really see herself, the real person inside.
Swallow is a deeply optimistic play about the possibilities of connection between individuals, however damaged. Swallow is not afraid of going to dark places, but it takes something from Leonard Cohen’s maxim: the cracks let in the light. Painful yet playful, poignant but uplifting, this play takes a long hard look at the extremes of everyday life. Questions of identity, heartbreak and hope are explored with vivid, poetic intensity.
“Stef Smith’s bloody great bruise of a play” – Guardian
“A striking, important piece of theatre” – Broadway Baby
Performance Details:
Wednesday to Saturday, 15 to 18 March, 7:30pm
Isaac Theatre Royal, Gloucester Room
Tickets: $26 Adults / $24 Concessions (Service fees apply)
Book at Ticketek.co.nz or 0800 Ticketek
Contains adult themes
CAST
Anna – Karyn Gibson
Rebecca – Jay Grubb
Sam – Nikki Conyers
Crew
Producer/Director – Garry Thomas
Stage Manager – Sonya Cameron
Technical – Craig Blaikie
Set Design – Garry Thomas
Lighting Design – Craig Blaikie
Sound Design – Garry Thomas
Theatre ,
Troubled lives find hope through unpredictable happenings
Review by Lindsay Clark 16th Mar 2017
It is not hard to imagine this intrepid little play as festival fare (Edinburgh Fringe 2015), or to see why it earned a Fringe First award from the Scotsman for its forthright depiction of three lonely individuals, captured at a time in each of their lives when something has to change. Through their fractured and often fraught interaction, it does.
Anna, Rebecca and Sam(antha) begin the play in three separate spaces on a composite set which suggests a run-down urban apartment. There are no obvious links and for some time we are on the receiving end of individual streams of consciousness.
Anna is intent on reducing her room to shards or shreds, which she will recycle as collage or mosaic. Beneath her, Rebecca is reliving her trauma with smashed glass after her man walked out. In front of an imaginary mirror and therefore in a position of direct address for us, Sam practises moving like the male she feels she really is. Each then is trapped in a web of painful circumstance, intensely projected, rescued from indulgence by some sharp writing.
Then the tiny, tentative relationships begin to take hold. Rebecca is driven to make contact with her upstairs neighbour when her violent partner returns for his television set and is in turn approached by Sam, presenting as male and looking for an empty seat at lunchtime. It takes a while for honesty, self-knowledge and a glimmer of acceptance to smooth away the debris of three troubled lives, but eventually each finds a way to move on.
The play, calibrated so subtly and ranging from this one to that with indirect cues, presents hefty challenges for the cast. When the monologues shift into dialogue, the forward movement comes as a relief, but the committed sincerity of all three actors establishes confident and strongly stated characters.
Anna’s desperate state is given poignancy by Karyn Gibson, echoed by Rebecca (Jay Grubb) and Sam (Nikki Conyers) as they negotiate a tricky relationship.
The opening night audience is certainly absorbed, interested in the lives before them and responsive to the sometimes unexpected humour which emerges when people are alone and frank.
It is a play well chosen for this intimate venue and beyond the immediate experience, a reminder that hope is sometimes found through strange an unpredictable happenings.
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