★★★★

Adelaide Fringe. Gavin Roach Presents. Holden Street Theatres. 16 Feb 2022

 

What a very strange and haunting piece of theatre.

Zinnie Harris has written a time-and-place-warp play about love, posthumous recrimination and a somewhere-nowhere world of existential plurality.

 

It begins with two sea-drenched women on a beach. Their hired boat has sunk. Where are they? Is this a sand bar or an island?

 

And thus begins the exploration of time and place and, indeed, the variable possibilities of reality.

The women, Helen and Robyn, are partners; one is a geologist and the other an academic. They are anxious for rescue because they are dog-sitting at home. Helen, the geologist is charged with energy and positivity. She makes an SOS with their discarded wet clothes.

 

Rescue is inevitable because the owners of the sunken boat will want to find out where it went. Robyn is having dreamscape flashbacks of a flooding sink and doomful messages from her mother. Helen sees this as symptomatic of concussion.

There is a woman on the island with whom they try to communicate. It is all very enigmatic and they make no effort to follow her. Why, wonders the audience.  

 

From English playwright Zannie Harris this is a plucky plunge into an underworld of existential theatre. One thinks of Godot and also Pinter as Robyn becomes immersed in a puzzle of repetitive sentence fragments, tearing at the soft edges of recollection.

 

And, one ponders how hard it must be for an actor to memorise these contemplative torrents of broken dialogue.  There is a thread and it leads to a denouement. But nothing is easy in this work. It is perchance rather overwritten. 

 

One may or may not agree with its sense of mystical possibilities or the philosophic wrist-wringing of this play, but one can’t deny that it is taking one into an oddly dangerous headspace.

It is delivered through the absolute commitment of the actors in a dark setting where just a crumpled stretch of plastics suggests the shore (Meg Wilson) and an evocative soundscape imposes the threats of an inimical sea (Sascha Budimski). 

 

Under Nescha Jelk’s direction, the two actors define finely the contrasting psychologies which make up that strange beast called human love. Sarah Bos is admirable as right-brained Helen while Wendy Bos, possessed of a sublime stage voice, skilfully delivers the emotional motherlode of the play.

And, one gives those two actors an extra salute because they have performed for an arduous hour in wet clothes with wet hair on a wet stage.

 

Ah, but under a sublime lighting plot by Mark Oakley.

 

Samela Harris

 

When: 16 to 27 Feb

Where: Holden Street Theatres

Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au