Lizzie Nunnery is unique among British playwrights in having one foot on the stage and the other in the folk clubs. It was always to be hoped that she would combine her dual careers as a playwright and a singer-songwriter, and this is the result: a memory-play with music inspired by the wartime experiences of her grandfather, who sailed with the Royal Navy to liberate the Norwegian port of Narvik in April 1940.
The action is a continually shifting sequence of impressions arising from the distress of Jim, a 90-year-old Liverpool man who has suffered a fall at his home. Into his consciousness springs Else, a beguilingly free-spirited schoolteacher from Oslo, whom Jim first meets in his prewar role as a trawlerman. Then there is Kenny, a buoyant though evidently troubled radio operator with whom he spends long, intimate nights holed up in the signal room of a British destroyer.
Hannah Tyrrell-Pinder’s production for Box of Tricks has a chilled, hallucinatory quality, enhanced by a fluid design from Maeve Black that suggests the ice-floes and gunmetal skies of arctic warfare. Joe Shipman brilliantly handles the transitions between Jim’s elder and younger selves, while Lucas Smith captures Kenny’s slightly edgy false cheer and there is an unknowable quality to Nina Yndis’s Else that ultimately proves dangerous.
But it is the music – a skein of electronically filtered shanties and ballads performed by Nunnery and her regular collaborators Vidar Norheim and Martin Heslop – that is used to most atmospheric effect. It’s almost a tease, as fragments of melody mysteriously appear and suddenly melt away, with the confidence of a writer who has talent to burn.
The only accusation you can level is that the 70-minute piece has a tendency become too enigmatic for its own good; yet it remains a thrillingly theatrical encapsulation of a little-known theatre of war.
- At the Liverpool Playhouse until 19 September. Box office: 0151-709 4776.
