by Freddy Syborn
Corpus Playroom
November 5-8
Dir. Freddy Syborn; Pembroke Players

Five Stars

An actress and a journalist post-coitally argue about death and violation in an airless hotel room, and a brother and sister discuss sex and god in a bombed Islamic city.

The more complete a theatrical experience, the harder it is to dissect and criticise and, frankly, I really can’t think of a better new play I’ve seen at Cambridge. As both writer and director of this forty-five minute piece, Freddy Syborn skillfully avoids all the usual over-earnest pitfalls of ‘student writing’ and instead constructs his own strong and impressive theatrical language. The voices of the protagonists interweave the naturalistic and the lyrical – a stilted, filthy joke about a paedophile raping a syphilitic nine year old is subverted and transformed into an elegy for a lost child: “the lilies went when she lay down in the earth.” Here images and words blend in patterns that are both strikingly beautiful and deeply unsettling.
One of the central conceits of the play is the unbearable, destructive tension between two ideas of the world. One finds joy in life as it is, where “the world rhymes with itself;” and the other the certainty that “pounding blood is running down the cracks of the world” and that the only route to joy and love is to break out and escape through death into a universe of perfectibility. I wasn’t entirely convinced by Syborn’s idea that “the celebrity commits suicide and the suicide bomber seeks celebrity,” but perhaps this was because the play and the production is too rich, too nuanced and too alive with disturbing inferences to be wrestled into a glib summary. Instead, the play does ‘rhyme’ with repeated and subverted gestures and images which simultaneously reflect, expose, darken one another.

This is a two man show and the performances by Giulia Galastro and Patrick Garety are both superb. Whilst the first scene could do with more variation of tone and speed during the longer speeches and faster, more charged movement, the pair are unselfconsciously convincing as a young Arab brother and sister. They also cope admirably with what must be a frightening level of exposure for actors – all of the action takes place on an illuminated white cube bed and within a few feet of the audience’s gaze, and every blink, touch, and broken gaze is registered.

To say more would be to dissect too far. This play and production truly deserve to be seen.

Isabel Taylor