The intriguing set – two seats stage left; accomplished musician and sound effects technician Te Aihe Butler’s music/SFX station stage right – are highlighted by cryptic lines and dots making a circuitry-like pattern on the rear black wall, and framed with beautifully woven symmetrical string designs stretching from the entrance across to and around the stage. 

Victoria Abbott and Jackie Shaw are two attractive young actresses who have developed this deceptively complex, deeply personal work based on their self-proclaimed “hunch [that] theatre should be personal, brave, and maybe a little bit risky.” 

Suffice to say they’ve fulfilled their own brief splendidly with Three.  Moreover, Butler’s manifold contribution cannot be understated.  His services include acoustic jazz and folk tunes, electronic and practical Foley sound effects, faceless incidental characters’ telephone voices and operating the bubble machine.  

The play begins with a casually delivered set of simple instructions: Jackie and Vic will be playing a number of characters between them, including themselves at various stages of their lives and a shared turn at the lead role; our job is to believe it. Can’t say fairer than that.

Disbelief is not at all difficult to suspend as it turns out, thanks to the committed performances, their clear identification of each character and context, and their employment of Verbatim theatre techniques whereby performances are a precise mirror of the voices and mannerisms of their real-life subjects, extracted from eight and a half hours of interviews. 

The central character is Marta, a woman in her fifties sharing her life story with us through the conduits of Jackie, then Victoria.  In fact, Victoria chooses to begin Marta’s life story at the same point all our lives began: the Big Bang.  From there she swiftly brings us through the history of the universe (perhaps skipping a few key stages) to the present in which Marta addresses us, and in and out of the near past in which her story takes place. 

As her intriguing, humorous and later deeply touching tale proceeds, the actors frequently step out of the action to reflect upon their own experiences, often involving their parents being generational peers with Marta and her husband, Dave.  It may sound convoluted, and it is, yet presented with sufficient clarity and intention that we always know where we are in the chronology.  

Three is about connections – with our families, friends, colleagues and so on, and ultimately between everything.  Connections define us, and give our definitions relevance.  No-one is an island.  Some people may dismiss the worth of such ideas as platitudinous cliché, until perhaps some incident or realisation occurs that highlights their significance in a personal way that is real and important to them.  See, the connections at work again.  Meaning itself cannot exist without connection. 

Jackie and Victoria are plainly aware of all this, yet their presentation is not at all evangelical or demonstratively profound.  Quite the contrary, if anything.  The remarkable, and in some ways surprising, power of verbatim theatre is testament to the power of truth, and how the less deliberately emphatic or amplified it is, the deeper it can cut.

They are very explicit in advertising this season as a workshop performance, intended to be developed further, and to this end have provided questionnaire forms with a range of questions along the lines of what you did, and didn’t enjoy or understand.  The last question asks what feeling you’re left with, to which I reply “melancholic joy”.

In terms of production style, they’re certainly on to something with the natural, matter-of-fact manner in which we’re instructed at the outset what to expect, how it will happen, and not to freak out.  This approach supplies lightness and humour to a sometimes harrowing narrative, while again illustrating the potency of undisguised truth. 

Besides some potential for dynamic lighting to subtly increase focus and clarity to the overall work, it’s difficult to offer any suggestion for improvement to the barefaced, organically devised and delivered form of the work, which really does seem to simply work.  The natural charisma of the two performers is another integral factor.

As for the curious cryptic designs on the wall, they are a literal visualisation of the pervasive theme of Three: that it’s all about the connections. 

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer