Review: THE SWELL, Orange Tree Theatre

The world premiere of Isley Lynn’s The Swell is a head scratching affair. It’s a short sharp 90 minutes, but there’s a lot to get your head around. Buckle up.

The Swell is a Queer melodrama split in into two timelines. One sees the slow birth of a relationship between the charmingly elusive Bel and the freewheeling Flo. It is tinged with clandestine thrill; Bel is engaged to Annise, Flo’s strait-laced best friend. The choice between clinging onto the vestiges of youth and grasping adulthood is clear: Flo’s wrists are wrapped in gap year bracelets. Annise is workaholic dressed straight from the office.

Things take a turn when Bel hits her head during a lovers’ spat. It induces a stroke and we are told she is rendered unable to differentiate between objects or people. It is somewhere between the supercharged melodrama of Hollyoaks and the psychological nastiness of Gogol, a cultural crossover you didn’t see coming.

Meanwhile the second timeline, unfolding concurrent to the first, where an older couple, referred to as Bel and Flo, receive a mysterious visitor. Everything is not what it seems, and the play dives into a murky pool of confusion.

On paper it has a tragic weight. Without revealing too much about the plot, its DNA is infused with underlying nastiness. Everyone is a victim and suffers because of it. But instead the production is a rose-petaled romance with an early noughties power ballad score blaring between scenes, teary eyes, and celebratory declarations of love.

Ignoring the cruelty coiled at its core is the only the first hurdle to overcome. The production keeps us guessing who is who, which of the younger cast match the older timeline. Deliberate ambiguity intends to disarm the audience, drawing us in with mystery. You can feel the writing bending over backwards to insert a vague “she” or “hers” wherever it can to exacerbate the ever-growing sense of apoira.

It shoots itself in the foot as a result. There are moments of spark filled warmth between the various lovers, but trying to suss out who is who stifles any real emotional blossoming. It’s so bewildering that I wondered if we were even watching the same story or two similar ones juxtaposed for poetic effect. Why not just let the story breathe without the soap drama antics?

Hannah Hauer-King’s direction doesn’t help to disentangle the play’s knottiness. The actors skirt around, on top of, and sometimes within, a clunky concrete platform that hoovers up the oxygen in the room, squeezing the performances to its side. They somehow manage. Saroja-Lily Ratnavel is particularly outstanding as the young Annise, eruditely conjuring jagged melancholia that lingers just perceptible beneath her collected exterior.

Shortlisted for The Women’s Prize for Playwriting 2020, one can imagine The Swell reading well on the page. But its conceptual ambition doesn’t translate well onto stage.

The Swell plays at the Orange Tree Theatre until 29 July

Photo Credit: Ali Wright

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