Jimmy, who is 34 and lives with his mum, can’t pinpoint the exact moment that he began to disappear. Yet he wakes up one morning to discover that his hands have gone, to be followed by his ears and other extremities, creating a profound sense of panic that there will soon be nothing left.
Perhaps Jimmy’s strange dematerialisation can be linked to losing his zero-hours contract at a drive-through doughnut outlet in Newport. Or maybe it is divine retribution for calling a premium-rate sex line while his mother is out at Salvation Army meetings. But the chatline’s nine-minute minimum leaves plenty of time to confide his anxieties in Kitty, who is trying to save funds for a psychology course. Eventually he recognises her as the voice of the angel who buys extra doughnuts for others in the drive-through queue.
Alan Harris – who took a Judges’ award in the 2015 Bruntwood prize for this lyrical little two-hander – is an offbeat purveyor of big-hearted, small-town stories (his play A Good Night Out in the Valleys launched the programme of National Theatre Wales). Though this features just two performers, it is essentially a play for voices in which the excellent Rhodri Meilir and Alexandria Riley embody a cast of misfits, religious fanatics and topiary enthusiasts who make the malls and call centres of south Wales seem as rich and strange as Dylan Thomas’s Llareggub.
Liz Stevenson’s production – shared by the Sherman in Cardiff and Keswick’s Theatre by the Lake – is minimally staged but neatly attuned to the melancholic undertow of Harris’s writing. “Are we like candles?” Jimmy wonders. “Do we have a certain amount of light, and when that’s gone, we’re gone?” At 70 minutes, it’s a fairly brief candle but, as Jimmy and Kitty finally unite in a darkened car park, it burns brightly.
- At Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 13 May (Box office 0161-833 9833), Sherman theatre, Cardiff, 16-27 May, and Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, 1-24 June.
