Continuum
22.3.2016
Alphabetti Theatre is a small venue in Newcastle city
centre. It’s hidden away in a basement building opposite the grand City library
and the Laing Art Gallery. You enter through blue gates (helpfully identified
in their “How to find us” on the website, and are led down narrow steps,
flanked by monochrome tribalistic murals on brick walls. At the bottom you
enter a surprisingly warm, quirky bar and are greeted with friendly smiles.
Alphabetti is quirky and strange – a mishmash
of recycled and up cycled furniture and fittings – partitions like allotment
fences made from old doors, your seat is
one of many mismatched old dining chairs (available to purchase if you find you
like it so much you want to take it home). You’d be forgiven for thinking that the play
you’ve come to see might be equally thrown together and a bit home made. But while Alphabetti might run on a
shoestring, it aims to bring high quality new writing to new audiences, and
give the writers a venue to try out their words. The atmosphere is friendly and relaxed and
the production surprisingly slick for such a hotchpotch space. These are people
who not only love what they do, but know what they are doing.
Continuum is staged in the centre of the room with the chairs
ranged around three sides. On the stage is a hospital bed with a motionless
figure (asleep?). Two chairs with female occupants who wait patiently and still
while the theatre fills. The action starts with the first of the women
addressing the sleeping man. This is Ben Savage – he is not sleeping we learn,
but in a coma after a traffic accident. His girlfriend is waiting for him to
come round. She’s been told to talk to him, that it may help to pull him round.
She has been there for three days but what she needs to talk about is clearly not
what might be helpful to the situation. She’s distraught and emotional. The lighting switches from the prone man to
the other female character – the doctor, as Jenny tries to glean some
information and hope from the doctor. There is no information. They must wait
till Ben wakes in order to assess the full extent of his injuries. Ben wakes suddenly, in mis sentence as if he
has been part of earlier conversations. Ansd so begins the process of piecing together
Ben’s memories. They are fractured, pieces are missing. Vital pieces.
As the play progresses we slowly learn what brought these
three people to this point – like putting together a jigsaw pice by piece the
story unfolds, sometimes with a pice in the wrong place, sometimes with a pieces
missing altogether until finally, even with some pieces still missing the
audience can see the full picture.
Continuum explores the nature of relationships, of memories
and identity, of guilt and responsibility. It is tense, funny, emotional and, I found,
incredibly sad. It is about a man who loses himself and finds himself again,
discovering the best of himself in the same moment that he discovers the worst.
It is the story of four lives affected by a moment’s
folly. Powerfully written and touchingly
and convincingly portrayed by the four actors.
Written by Richard Stockwell
Directed by Ali Pritchard
Performed by Matt Jamie, Rosie
Stancliffe, Arabella Arnott, James Barton
Continuum plays until 25th
March – book your place and pay what you think it is worth at the end of the
performance.
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