Isabella Waldron’s delicate play stages an unusual meet cute: eyes connecting over a spilled tray of glass eyes. You don’t see that every day.
Bea (Nell Barlow) is an ocularist about to give a lecture at London’s Wellcome Institute, but she’s in a bit of a state. Flustered, fumbling her file cards, more than moist with anxiety (“I sweated through a coat once”), she’s hiding out in a storeroom when another woman (Alice Franziska) comes in cradling a birthday cake. Cue the rolling eyes and Bea gabbling her life story, or at least her love story.
In flashback, 17-year-old Bea meets an intriguing older neighbour, Margot (Olivia Dowd). Margot makes medical wax figures, painstakingly crafting “hideous diseases in 3D form”. It’s an arrestingly niche calling, and Bea falls for both the art and the artist. In Margot’s flat, smelling of “stewed apple and stamps”, she gets to experience the joy of wax and soon she’s making eyes at and for Margot, and her detailed recreations of gout, plague and pox. It’s a teenage idyll of painting fine red lines on artificial eyeballs, during which Bea also encounters her first ciggie, her first kiss, her first love.
Nell Bailey’s production keeps its eyes on the prize of beautifully nuanced performances. It builds on deft flecks of character: alongside Franziska’s keen-eyed observer and Dowd’s assured, laconic artist, Barlow is a delight as bumbling Bea, feelingly moving between wide-eyed adolescence and more self-aware, if klutzy, adulthood.
I’m pressing hard on the eye imagery but it’s actually wax that carries the metaphoric weight. Feeling flows and solidifies between the lovers, and the younger Bea is a soul in soft wax, finding her form and worried that she’ll melt in love’s furnace, “liquid and gooey”. Although Margot ends the relationship, anxious about the age difference, the heart can’t easily be moulded.
The characters may feel they haven’t fulfilled their potential, but at just 60 minutes the play too might dig deeper. But Waldron’s writing is refreshingly calm about queer identity and desire, and it’s a mature and tender piece. The eyes have it.
At Assembly George Square Studios, Edinburgh, until 29 August.
