“We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word is spoken.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky
A middle-aged professor of Creative Writing at a prestigious Ivy League University stands before an audience of strangers. Is this audience friendly, she wonders? Forgiving? Are they easily distracted? Prone to dismissing the complexities of difficult matters of the heart? Or will they hear her out?
But down to brass tacks. She teaches that, while she might indulge in purple prose, readers only need a few telling clues, they should be left to create characters in their minds.
Filling in some knowing facts she states that she has never married, has no children and has been “accused of being a lesbian. And a witch. And a maker of Bulgarian cheese. And a collector of cat calendars.” She has been healthy, up to the point when tests reveal her stomach is riddled with a constellation of tumours. Her mother died from cancer around the same age, reduced to a larval version of herself, dissolving into nothingness.
Christopher is a student who makes a disarming initial impression, not joining his classmates to check social media, seemingly out of time, old fashioned and yet like an oversized fourteen-year-old. He values human interaction and without the courtesy of appointments seeks Bella out to talk intensely about the course, her one marginally successful young adult novel published 17 years before, but mainly about the novel which he is writing. It’s a novel that will consume him, taking over his life to a point where there is a vague nagging doubt that it is fictionalised autobiography.
These two conspicuously lonely outsiders bond over a love of literature and while there is a frisson, a tension between them, he is “about as sexually inclined as your standard, run-of-the-mill parking meter” and her form of adultery is with a book, “performing the book with the author, and how is that not like making love?”.
When she reaches out in the dark to ask him an unthinkable favour, he in turn trusts her with his hand typed novella which leaves the reader with an ellipsis …
The professor/student relationship is a well-trod path, but this play doesn’t follow the same turns to examine love, loss, loneliness and death. The script is beautifully written, flowing between dialogue and narration to be lyrical, bookish and wry. The moodily lit minimalist staging is little more than two chairs which are gradually moved closer to each other as do the characters, leaving the focus on magnificent performances.
A compelling production which leaves the audience to fill in the gaps.
Show Times: 28 July to 25 (not 5, 12, 19) August 2024 at various times. Captioned 18, audio described 23 – 25.
Tickets: £22.75 (£17.75). Other concessions available.
Suitability:14+ (Contains themes of assisted suicide, cancer, strong language, haze, strobe lighting and blackouts).
Note: the production is part of TravFest24.