Theatre / Reviews
Review: Pyg, Tobacco Factory Theatres – ‘A bold, smartly acted and uncomfortable play’
There’s a particular kind of stage image that does more work than any line of dialogue could, and the Somerset and Wiltshire-based theatre company Sandcastles Productions finds one early in Pyg: a mannequin standing at the centre of a room, and a line of tape on the floor separating memory from forgetting. It’s a simple gesture, and it’s enough to tell you this is not going to be a play interested in easy answers.
The premise is a slippery one. Harrison (or rather, three versions of him, a teenager, a man in his thirties, a pensioner) has been summoned to this liminal space, though none of them can quite agree on why, or how long they’ve been coming here.
Each version of Harrison is played by a different actor, and the characters interact with each other at times. This device could easily have tipped into gimmick, but sharp dialogue ensures the gamble is a successful one.
is needed now More than ever
At its centre is the mannequin, mute witness and catalyst, around which Harrison’s life unspools. What begins as something tender – a study in loneliness and the ordinary human hunger for company – curdles, by degrees, into something much uglier: a portrait of the violence that can live inside wanting someone who won’t want you back.
The programme note promises a play that’s “tender until it’s unnerving; funny until it’s horrifying,” and for the most part it delivers on that promise, particularly in Harrison’s discussions with his mother.
Rafael Griso’s young Harrison is the load-bearing performance here — his Harrison has to carry a mounting sense of dread without ever losing the audience’s sympathy, and Griso does so brilliantly. Harry Lloyd Yorke and Joe Orrell, both playing older versions of the protagonist, manage their respective positions very well.
Technically, the production makes smart use of its confines. The Spielman is an intimate space, and writer/director Charlie Lachlann McGuire uses that proximity smartly. At an hour with no interval, the piece doesn’t have room to breathe much, and mostly that’s a strength: it keeps its grip on the escalating unease rather than letting it slacken.
Where Pyg is less surefooted is in its dramaturgy. The complex sci-fi plot does present holes – the three Harrisons lose their memory as they pass the tape into the space, in the style of Severance, so the outside Harrison has no memory of the inside Harrison, and vice versa. Towards the end this ‘rule’ is disobeyed slightly in the younger, ‘outside’ Harrison’s dialogue following an adult Harrison crossing a gap and intervening is his experience.
Still, this is a bold, uncomfortable little play that trusts its audience to sit with ambiguity, and a company clearly unafraid of asking what we become when we think nobody’s watching.
View this post on Instagram
Pyg will be at the Edinburgh Fringe from August 24-29. Follow the show @pyg_edinburghfringe.
Main photo: Sandcastles Productions
Read next:
Our newsletters emailed directly to you
