Did you ever have to do that experiment at school where you watched crystals form in a saturated solution? You know how they just sort of “pling” into existence and, all of a sudden, liquid transforms into a glorious, solid shape? Well, that was rather the experience of watching this cluster of short, sharp dialogues – 29 of them, if I counted correctly.
A voiceover announces a number followed by a title, telling us something specific but not defining: “Number 12: Waitrose, north London”; “Number 40: A GP’s surgery, King’s Lynn”. Guardian readers may recognise the format, remembering Craig Taylor’s vignettes from the column he wrote. Each heading is followed by a brief exchange that crystallises a relationship in words that sound as if they have been scooped straight from the street, or park, or record-exchange shop, or sitting room that its elderly inhabitant mistakes for a hotel. Each is touching, hilarious, upsetting, thought-provoking – pithy. Brilliant on the page, it sort of shouldn’t work as performance – too bitty, too intense, too disparate, too bite-sized. But work it does.
Partly, there’s the sheer fun of Emma Barclay and Alec Nicholls’s lightning changes: layers of costume added and subtracted; convincing characterisations created or jettisoned in split seconds. There’s something more. Almost every so-sharp situation elicits an audible response. Why do only some of us laugh at this one? Why do all of us groan at that one? Why did someone gasp “No!” at that revelation? The actors, under Laura Keefe’s direction, gradually increase direct contact with the audience (very direct in the post-interval bingo session). The atmosphere becomes saturated with awareness of shared humanity: so fragile, so glorious, so hilarious, so understandable, so inexhaustible. The million tiny plays take shape, every day, all around us.
