Review: BRILLIANT TRACES, White Bear Theatre

The White Bear Theatre is an ideal venue for eMPhasis Theatre's Brilliant Traces, partly because its size mimics the chance intimacy with a stranger that sets up the drama and partly because you're half expecting a crashing at the door and our odd couple to exit, pursued by a polar bear.

And what an odd couple they are. Rosanna panicky, half-frozen to death, in a wedding dress but with precisely nothing of Elsa's "Let It Go" inspired liberation from past traumas and Henry the hermit, obviously running away from something, hiding alone in the Alaskan wilderness. After she has slept for a couple of days to recover from a drive from Arizona (Arizona!), they start to talk, to bicker and, eventually, to find common ground.

Both actors fully commit to their performances (pretty much essential in fringe theatre two-handers), with Sam Kamras on edge throughout as the runaway bride and Michael Feldsher's Henry slowly emerging from his self-imposed silence through a combination of empathy and irritation with his unexpected and unwanted guest. Director, Penny Gkritzapi, eases back on the opportunities for soap opera style shouting (and there are plenty in Cindy Lou Johnson's script) with the understated demonstration of pain working much better in this space than would more demonstrative, louder gestures.

The key issue for the play is that things have moved on since it was written 33 years ago, when depression was understood barely at all by the public, trigger warnings were for handguns and at least half the audience would have left asserting that the pair should just "pull themselves together". Because awareness of such matters is much more commonplace (or it should be in Kennington in 2022) foreshadowing elements are more obvious than they would have been a generation or so ago and subsequent reveals are less revealing.

That familiarity with key plotting components gives us time to consider the more phantasmagoric elements of the play. Is Rosanna real at all - her story does not check out in any rational world? Is Henry's tale a defence mechanism he tells himself covering an even more traumatic past? Are we, unlikely as it sounds, hemmed into a world of Alaskan Magical Realism?

It's not the reviewer's role to kvetch about a play they did not see, but one can't help think that the one we did see is dated in the dramatic themes it does explore and barely developed at all in the themes it introduces and then coyly backs away from. Rosanna and Henry in a hut in 2022 would make for a much more satisfying evening.

Brilliant Traces is at the White Bear Theatre until 9 April

Photo howdydoodydoris

To post a comment, you must register and login.