Review: SHORE BREAK at Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre

Reviewed by Ewart Shaw, Tuesday 3rd September 2024.

Shore Break, a vernacular soliloquy delivered by Chris Pitman, mesmerised the preview audience in the Space Theatre. Working with directors, Chelsea Griffith and Chris Drummond, he has taken on a great challenge. He has nowhere to hide as actor, or writer. The man stands barefoot on seagrass matting. There’s a surfboard and a beach chair. A yellow milk crate exists only to be kicked. He’s a plain-speaking working-class lad, and you’ll need to lean forward as he’s not amplified. He speaks eloquently of his meeting with the sea. It’s, as we find out, a gift, perhaps the only one, from his father. The sea, either partnered through surfing or terrifying in fury, is both a character and a metaphor. As a young boy, a battered old surfboard took him far from shore to lie perfectly alone, and now he returns to that patch of beach where he truly belongs. The details of how he found it again and, indeed, where it is, are irrelevant. This liminal space is his stage, and the sea and us, of course, are party to his life story.

The man seems to have a real problem empathizing with the humans around him. At one point he is proud to have reduced a well-meaning teacher to tears in front of the class. He can describe the clouds outside the classroom windows, but not the life inside. Now, he’d attract a diagnosis of ADHD.

You are shocked, but not surprised, when he admits he missed his father’s funeral because he was in jail. The slow lead-up to the event that jailed him, reaches a climax, when he almost by accident, gets into a fight, and wins. A man in a bar picks a fight with him. The description of the fight is graphic, and the ending is heart-touching as the man who initiated the fight pleads in tears to be left alone. You feel so deeply for that man.

The last minutes of the play have Pitman caught up in the great wave and surrendering and yet trying to survive. Spat out onto the beach, or just caught up in all the memories that are supposed to flash between our eyes at the point of death, he is subsumed in the purifying and unthinking touch of the sea. We witness the last moments of a man we cannot like or love. As theatre-goers, we are primed to identify but, here, we applaud the actor and writer for a creation we can only observe, rather like a species of animal, or an insect under a microscope.

Chris Pitman’s achievement is mighty as an actor holding our attention and bringing a sturdy presence to our attention. As a writer, he has created a man of a type we would avoid, yet gives us the insight that enlivens a life without art.

Shore Break is presented by Brink Productions in association with Adelaide Festival Centre and as part of State Theatre Company South Australia’s 2024 STATESIDE program.