The Singularity is a singularly tricky piece of theatre to review.  It’s a work enjoyed more after seeing it, when you can put the many fractured pieces of information together to make sense of the whole. While you’re watching, you’re just too busy trying to keep up to relax and enjoy the work.  And that’s not a criticism, it’s a pleasure to be treated as an intelligent and questioning theatre goer.

You don’t have to have seen this company’s two earlier works – the man on the moon and the telescope – but it surely helps.  All three deal with isolation, loneliness, people on the fringe of mainstream society.  Their homes are their sanctuaries. 

In The Singularity we have four people on stage, in an apartment block.  A young couple who’ve somehow lost their child, an older man who watches the woman and sees himself as her protector from her violent husband. There is also an older woman who gives piano lessons and lends an ear to the younger woman.  Gradually we see how their lives intersect. 

The cast is exceptionally good in a damned difficult play to pull off.  Danny Mulheron is unnerving as the older man who lives like a rat in the "weeping walls" of the building.  Jessica Robinson brings just the right balance of toughness and vulnerability to her role of the victimised wife, and Jason Whyte is comfortable in not unfamiliar territory as her hotwired hubby.  Rose Beauchamp initially feels stilted as the older woman but soon you see that’s the character talking, and when she lights up a cigarette and inhale with guilt-free delight, you just want to give her a hug.

Manasiadis has both written the play (based on ideas generated by her, Whyte and Martin Roberts) and directs it, and has done both astutely and courageously.  Roberts’ set design and (with Rob Larsen) lighting design are striking and important elements in the production – the space tells a story of its own, it’s not just inhabited by these people.

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Afterburner, the theatre company that brought us Man on the Moon (2001) and The Telescope (2002), now completes what it calls The Cell Trilogy with The Singularity, a complex and puzzling play that, like the other two plays, combines astrophysics, human nature, and a mundane earthly setting.

On a raised stage, a rarity at BATS, Martyn Roberts has cleverly created two seemingly large apartments, a basement and a narrow space between the two apartments where a caretaker squeezes himself in to watch the occupants on closed circuit television.

Every now and then the caretaker, Ray (Danny Mulheron), invades one of the apartments from behind a fridge to steal a photo or to leave cryptic messages ("We are islands.") written on apples. He listens and comments to himself on the conflict between a young woman called Iris (Jessica Robinson) and her abusive partner (Jason Whyte). They are breaking up. A child seems to have been part of their problems.

In the other apartment is an elderly piano teacher, also called Iris (Rose Beauchamp), who had a child whose twenty-eighth birthday is about to be celebrated. She gives comfort at times to the younger Iris and she knitted baby clothes for her but these are returned. She also gives piano lessons to the caretaker, who turns out to be an accomplished pianist himself. At one point he suddenly asks her if she knows what The Singularity means.

He tells her it is when stars have collapsed in on themselves so much that gravity pulls in light itself – and nothing can escape. Why she has to know this was lost on me, except of course for metaphorical reasons, but the metaphor is never clearly made.

However, the pain of the young couple’s deteriorating relationship is sharply drawn, and the caretaker’s creepily obsessive behaviour and the piano teacher’s loneliness are also dramatically absorbing and forcefully acted.

As with the other two plays of the trilogy the setting, lighting (Martyn Roberts and Rob Larsen), and soundscape (Matthew Hutton) are of a high quality. The script, however, was, for me at least, a tricky cryptic crossword in which I was able to fill in only a very few of the answers.

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Afterburner, founded in 2001 by Martyn Roberts with a stronger-than-usual focus on light and sound design, specialises in the astronomical metaphor.

Man on the Moon (2001) explores desire and regret by showing a man missing the moon landing because he is too trapped in his mundane tea-making routine. The Telescope (2002/4) characterises love as a supernova: in the very act of glowing bright, the starburst is already dying.

Now  T h e  S i n g u l a r i t y  plays with the idea that when stars have collapsed in on themselves, so much so that gravity pulls in light itself, nothing can escape (Singularity Theory). But rather than addressing the ‘black hole’ of depression, this play takes us into the inescapable reality of an abusive, co-dependent relationship.

Initially, as staged within the elevated skeletal framework of two adjacent apartments – Roberts managing to make the BATS space look huge – it seems a young couple (Jessica Robinson & Jason Whyte) are attempting a civilised separation. He thanks her for letting him stay the night; she has slept on the couch … A lone older woman (Rose Beauchamp) dwells next door with her piano. It turns out she is a piano teacher. So far so objectively credible …

Except another man (Danny Mulheron) lives between the walls, under the floorboards, listening, monitoring via surveillance cam, commenting, philosophising … He also listens to tapes of piano-playing. Occasionally he slips in from behind the fridge to pen epigrammatic messages where the younger woman will find them: "All is one moment"; "We are islands" … She is a little mystified but not freaked out by this.

The ex-partner soon reveals himself as controlling, judgemental, emotionally and physically abusive. And the way she fights back suggests she is as locked into the perpetual cycle as he is. There was a child, now lost to them, either as a cause or effect of the breakdown. Not dead; removed for its own safety, it seems. Given up for adoption? Today is his birthday.

The piano teacher is awaiting a birthday boy, she too has ‘lost’ a son, this is his 28th birthday … There are baby clothes, apparently knitted by the piano teacher, given to the young mother, now returned because they provoke hurtful memories … But the sanctuary the older woman offers her neighbour, when required, is appreciated.

Thus readily recognised truths of human existence vie with physical and logical impossibilities to make us realise we are dealing here with subjective realities and metaphysical truths – e.g. someone speaks of feeling loss for something she has never really known.

When the man from between the walls contrives to turn up for a piano lesson, he turns out to know a lot already (Beauchamp and Mulheron play some lovely duets). Could he be …? Or maybe she …? Are we talking different generations, imagined futures, parallel realities …?

Significantly only two names emerge: Ray and Iris; one a means of conveying light, the other a means of letting it in or blocking it out. And lighting, of course, plays a key role (designed by Roberts and Rob Larsen). Lights flicker and fade; fuses blow: a visual manifestation of the dysfunctional relationship.

Matthew Hutton’s soundscape (the rain sounds very real) and musical direction also add value to this allusive and elusive play. Everything conspires to evoke an almost tangible sense of emotional compression. And death, of course, is the ultimate inescapable state.

The puzzle is compelling, not least because all the actors are fully engaged in their characters’ realities, and of course we want to solve it. But I can’t say I had an ‘aha!’ moment where it all fell into place. I had to look back at my notes to recall that Ray-in-the-wall had said his wife was dead, to trigger the thought process that led me to a possible solution: the inescapable state involves an action that can never be reversed and the perpetrator is stuck in that realisation.

It’s a delicate balance, to be sure, between over and under-stating it, but despite the week-long preview season in its Miramar rehearsal room, I think more crafting is needed to either create the moment where we collectively ‘get it’ or ensure that we are able to come to the realisation in our own ways.

That said, T h e  S i n g u l a r i t y – written and directed by Miranda Manasiadis from an original story by herself, Martyn Roberts and Jason Whyte – does have more dramatic pacing and structure than their previous productions. And its exploration of human frailty is inescapable.  

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