Written by Alison Stanley,
Live theatre is special, whether you're in a big gilded proscenium arch theatre or a little studio theatre up a set a creaking stairs. When it’s immersive, when you’re sharing space with real breathing human beings, it can be intense. I hadn’t thought quite how intense.
You Need to Say Sorry so intense. The Laurels is a small venue, up two flights of creaky stairs. For this production it was transformed into a cosy cafe with realistic menus. The audience sits at their cafe tables and appears to witness a couple at the next table.
Vic and Bill, an older couple are on a first date. They are connected via a friend of a friend of a friend on Facebook. There’s lots of awkward pleasant banter about technical incompetence, young people and their phones. There’s a glancing reference to online scammers and the dangers of meeting up with strangers: you don’t know who they might be. But this pair are too sensible to fall for that nonsense. We are drip-fed Viv and Bill’s backstory through this playful interaction. Viv is a widow with a daughter and grandchildren; Bill is divorced. They seem such a nice couple, we are willing them to get together…
… switch to a domestic interior, a living room. We gradually work out that this is the future where they have got together. (I didn’t at first; I thought it was a flashback). Not so much fun now. Bill is grumpy and critical; Viv is annoyingly eager to please. The course of true love never does run smooth, does it?
… back to the café. As an audience, we are now alerts to hints and clues. Bill talks about his own step-father, who was a bit too handy with his belt. But he’s turned out all right, hasn’t he? He’s charming and has a funny mannerism, of not getting cliché phrase quite right: “You’ve buttered your bread, now you’ve got to lie in it.” It’s a winning flaw, we’re willing to give him the benefit of the doubt…
This is the drawback of immersive theatre: empathy. There’s a scene in Don Quixote, where Quixote is at a puppet theatre and mistakes the actors for real life and leaps up to violently defend the abused heroine. It’s funny because it’s theatre and we know the difference. Tell that to my sympathetic nervous system! The coercive control and verbal abuse is so well-observed, so horribly real that I had to stop myself jumping up like Quixote and yelling at Viv to get out while she still can.
My heart was thumping in my chest as if I was in real physical danger. I knew it was a piece of theatre, constructed out of words, scripted for actors, but it was so well written and performed that I felt I was there, helplessly witnessing the annihilation of a once bubbly loving woman.
Alison Stanley has done a brilliant job of conveying the soul-shredding texture of coercive control, and she is ably supported by Steve Lowes as Bill, convincingly alternating between funny charmer and terrifying abuser. It’s an important issue dealt with fantastic subtlety and wit, but not one to see if you’re feeling fragile.
You Need to Say Sorry was showing for just two nights at The Laurels, but watch out for it making a return at Alphabetti in July!
Gerry Byrne
