With last year's Edinburgh hit, Pornography, currently in London at the Tricycle, and Punk Rock about to open at the Lyric, it's shaping up to be Simon Stephens's year. The Traverse, meanwhile, has one he made earlier: Sea Wall, one of the most devastating 30 minutes that you are ever likely to experience in the theatre. This monologue drenched in grief, told by a man who has lost everything, is not easy viewing: every word settles into your bones and grows cold there. It gnaws all the more because of the most outstanding performance of the festival so far by Andrew Scott.
It pairs well with another Stephens piece, Heaven, one of six new plays by leading writers that the Traverse is premiering under the umbrella title The World is Too Much. While Sea Wall is about paradise lost, Heaven offers a glimpse of an encounter in one of those modern circles of hell: an airport. A young man, heading for Turin, is stopped in his tracks by an elderly man. Is it a moment of divine intervention or does it come too late? What is the young man looking for or fleeing from?
The piece is satisfactorily ambiguous, although it lacks the sheer power of Sea Wall, which so potently reminds us that it is often in the moment that life seems to be going most swimmingly that we suddenly find ourselves out of our depth. The extraordinary power of Sea Wall is that it is concerned with both the domestic and the majestic. "Why" is the unspoken question that resonates around the theatre. Stephens offers no answer, but he realises that it is our need to know that makes us human.
