Bedtime Solos - Across the Pond Theatre Company
Old Red Lion Theatre, Angel
Is physical proximity enough? Or is it necessary for two people to know the innermost workings of each other's minds in order to have a fulfilling relationship? Bedtime Solos exposes the different worlds inhabited by two people who supposedly share a high level of intimacy, while two stiff single beds show the distance within their union.
Self-obsession and reticence reign as each of the partners tells themselves bedtime stories of their pasts. Jakob Holder – the play’s author - masterfully integrates and eeks out references to the banal but pervasive events that cloud their childhood memories. Even during sex, and 'the greatest feeling in the universe', the couple are still far away from one another; he caught up in the re-imagination of wetting himself, and she in the traumatic fantasy of brash but apparently loving sex behind a dumpster.
As each partner becomes more involved with their own elaborate emotional world, together they become more tangled up in mental tantrums and conundrums. They begin to expect the other to understand the vaguest of hints to something too deep within their psyche to be guessed at.
Holder is something special. The agility, honesty and originality of the thought processes the characters go through makes you wish this was something you had written. It is natural and unforced, yet fresh and unpredictable. The private notions that enter the head of a man trying to stave off orgasm - of a cat, of cats, of dead cats, of the smell of vomit, of poking smelly dead cats with a stick - makes this play absurd yet very real.
Intricate shadow play, unfalteringly absorbing performances from Heather Wilds and Scott Christie, and a uniquely poetic script make Bedtime Solos flow past in a sense of post-coital timelessness.
Helena S. Rampley
Photo: Christian Alegria
Bedtime Solos runs at the Old Red Lion until 26th September
No comments:
Post a Comment