The Motorway is a beautifully evocative piece of spoken word interspersed with dance and physical theatre. It’s based on a South American story called ‘The Southern Thruway’ by Julio Cortazar and performed by Moira Fortin in both English and Spanish.

The work is about a group of vehicles trapped on a motorway for several days, due to an accident or some unconfirmed incident further ahead, near ‘The Capital’. It is a series of conversations and interactions as the various drivers and passengers shift from irritation at the delay to a tightly knit and supportive, if transient, community. A sense of resignation develops in the characters, and of camaraderie, as they share the tasks of finding food and water and warmth, and taking care of the sick and the elderly.

Fortin expresses each personality crisply and definitively with inflection and twists of her wrists or rolls of her eyes. Her energy throughout the very physical work is high and she manifests the changing relationships smoothly and with a great deal of humour.

The choreography by Sophia Kalogeropoulou is understated and varies from graceful to ungainly, perfectly reminiscent of the way traffic flows.

The stage is spare, featuring only a chair for a small part of the performance. The rest of the time, Fortin uses just her body and her voice to evoke the story. She lists cars and matches them to their inhabitants.

The Motorway is a story of the transience of our societal relationships but also of the ease with which humans can become a society and fall into roles of nurture and care. The camaraderie dissipates as soon as the traffic starts to flow but the narrator, and also the audience, is left with a sense of the importance of sharing space and empathy.

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