Review: THE SILVER BELL, VAULT Festival

The topic of love has been dissected and analysed and inspected for literal millennia. Its nooks and crannies have been explored, its emotional gears oiled and polished. Everything has been written, sung, and painted. Then there comes a story, a love story, that takes the concept and opens it up in a special way. Its forensic exploration makes it relevant once again. It's difficult to maintain delicate grip on something as fragile as the unfolding wings of a butterfly, but it does it undemandingly. That's what Alan Flanagan's The Silver Bell does.

Mico and James meet after a disastrous show at the Brockley Jack, both Irish expats in London. They fall in love and move in together. Then, James starts to actually fall. They don't talk about it until it happens again and again. They both take a step back from their jobs: James becomes a liability on the building sites he works at in-between acting gigs and Mico becomes his carer, slowing down on trying to find evidence of parallel universes at the Imperial College London (which he loathes).

When James passes, he scales up the project, hell-bent on finding the correct version of his life partner in every possible universe instead of dealing with his grief. What ensues is a frantic search through the multiverse. Directed by Dan Hutton, the piece is a stirring tragicomic drama where effortless tongue-in-cheek humour leans into the bittersweet undertones of Flanagan's tale in a fun, well-crafted script.

Flanagan himself (Mico) and Brendan O' Rourke (James) interrupt one another naturally and hilariously, driving the narrative openly in a turn of events that's as surprising as it's organic. The juxtaposition between their two personalities is amusing and artful. Mico is rather demure at the start, "socially a bottom, but with power, but not a power bottom" as James describes him. The latter is carefully dramatic in temperament, leading the dynamic with innuendos and interjecting into Mico's own anecdotal choices. The pair share a crackling, sophisticated chemistry.

Sacha Plaige curates the movement of the production, adding a physical element to the staging of the text and Amy Hill's precise lighting design complements and enhances the action, boosting the visual agility of the show.

Flanagan's subtext creeps in stealthily with a low-key discussion on what makes us, us. The singularity of souls, how coincidence and circumstances change the course of a life, the idiosyncratic relationshipa we create with specific people, they all come together with refined, empathetic technique and deft use of language. It's a gem of a play.

The Silver Bell runs at VAULT Festival until 12 February.

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