"Saoirse". Burton Taylor Studio. Review by Anuj Mishra

Saoirse is not for everyone. That is by no means a value judgement, for the play is quite brilliant, but it is a content warning.

A piece of new writing by Molly Hill and James Hunter, the play follows Grace (Sophia George), a young actress, and Mr Clarke (Cameron Maiklem), Grace’s school drama teacher. Their story is presented through an interview, which at points swings into interrogation. Asking the questions are the offstage voices of a psychoanalyst and a journalist – both voice recordings – but the actors respond and interrupt these tapes fluidly. As a result, the questioning voices grow aligned with us as the audience, so that they seem sat with us, or perhaps just behind us, in the cramped Burton Taylor.

Between the set of question-and-answers come sequences of dialogue between Grace and Clarke, where they recount and deliberate the circumstances of their relationship. These changes of format are well demarcated through the quick switching of lights: white and blaring in interview, yellow and soft in conversation.

As Grace and Clarke reminisce their pedagogical relationship, which reveals itself to be inappropriately desirous, even sexual, they perform together snatches of their consciously high school-y set-texts: The Crucible, The Seagull, Streetcar, Macbeth. A set of dialogue from Macbeth delivered at the end of the play almost felt part of the main plot, a testament to how well these snatches of dialogue were incorporated.

Throughout these overlapping formats, we get a sense of the young Grace’s delusions of her own power. When confronted by her analyst, she insists that it was she who seduced her teacher, implying a warped – and deeply unsettling – dynamic reminiscent of the phantasmic power that Nabokov’s Humbert ascribes to ‘his’ Lolita.

With the entry of Felix (James Hunter), Grace’s director and boyfriend, the troubling and abusive relationship between Grace and her teacher becomes further complicated. The writers coax us into sympathising with Clarke as he avenges Grace’s humiliation at Felix’s hands, though this sympathy is firmly dissipated by the testimony of Grace herself.

Sophia George and Cameron Maiklem did excellently in the lead roles, both gave remarkably strong deliveries, and George was particularly versatile in her performance of a young woman attempting to conceal a crumbling artifice of strength.

The play does not attempt to reinvent the wheel with its feminist commentary, but, for an hour’s watching, Saoirse packs a punch. Its metatheatrical staging and critique of the warped power dynamic between director and actor is particularly fresh. Saoirse is intense and disturbing, but well-executed, watch it at your own peril.

Runtime: 60 minutes, 9.30pm at the Burton Taylor until 30th November.

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