T5 and Sea Wall double bill review: Two very different responses to trauma pack an emotional punch

Irish Times

2 days ago

T5 and Sea Wall
Galway Arts Centre, Nun's Island
★★★★☆
This is a double-bill of plays by the British playwright (with Irish background)
Simon Stephens
, both short one-act monologues, small intense nuggets.
Winner of Tony and Olivier best-play awards for his hit stage adaptation of Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Stephens is a prolific and pin-sharp playwright, often chronicling emotional truth and asking difficult questions.
Stephens himself has acknowledged that Sea Wall (2008) is a favourite of his, a play also made into a film short starring Andrew Scott. T5 (from 2010) refers to Heathrow airport's Terminal 5. The two short (each about a half-hour long) monologues were previously paired together in 2012, presented as London. They are strong, forthright and beautiful pieces, emotionally powerful choices for Galway's Decadent Theatre Company's festival show.
In T5 Sarah Morris's performance is electric. She's wired and on the edge, frozen in position, eyes wide and blazing and maniacal, barely time to breathe. Amid the bustle of the city and the relentless and familiar tyranny of stuff and tasks and things to remember in modern life, 'I must…., I must…, I must…,' she has broken off, stopped, just walked away.
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The audience is within her mind during her journey, a mind crowded and frantic and troubled, occasionally bursting into the comfort of the line of a song. As things evolve, we see this is more than panic at the enormity of managing a life, but a response to trauma – or actually two traumatic situations.
Sea Wall starts more softly. Ian Lloyd Anderson is Alex, a young man with a blessed life. With tenderness, humour and emotional openness, he describes his absolute love for his wife Helen, how their eight-year-old daughter is 'my sweetheart and Helen's sidekick' and visiting his mathsy, characterful father-in-law, who lives on the south coast of France.
[
Playwright Simon Stephens: 'Our sense of self is defined by the stories we tell ourselves. My family told themselves we were Irish'
]
But Alex has a hole inside; not of emptiness, but from pain. He unfolds his story, which becomes one of those moments where everything falls away, the rug pulled out. The beautifully written script is matched by Lloyd Anderson's self-reflective, natural, charming, raw performance.
Ciaran Bagnall's set and lighting is low key, evoking a window beyond to the world.
Director Andrew Flynn's nuanced direction hits the tone of both, the mania and the gentle pain; the cracking scripts are gifts for him and for both actors. Though written separately, the plays work well together and bounce off each other as very different responses to trauma, singly and together having strength, delicacy and an emotional punch.
T5 and Sea Wall run at the
Galway Arts Centre
until July 26th