“No one can hurt me more than I can hurt myself.”
And it’s true and not true – as trivial arrogances of youth twist into adult guilt. Irrevocable change is done, and with it, irrevocable damage.
In flashes of past and future, we watch a group of petulant school friends grow up. Jolted navigations of guilt and grief hold the characters back, like puppeteers, defining their adolescence and lives beyond it. All circle around the electric and coruscating character of Zelda (Salma Balde) who is loved and loves in equal and destructive measures.
The structure is at times a little confusing, the brief yet deep flashes of characters which then throw us back or forwards in time overwhelms, but in doing so reflects the cloying persistence of the past, especially for Zelda. As the toxicity of adolescent love affairs becomes an unbreakable cycle, culminating in the small and grimy room of her honeymoon. We long for her to release these shackles of her past. The potential of this is shown in her ambiguous, yet undeniably beautiful relationship with the calmer, gentle Esther (Indie Slimmon). Using a projector at the very end of the performance, they represent an unfulfilled future, impossible, but rich with the potential of a different life.
Lighting is used brilliantly to change pace and perspective throughout. The stark contrasts of the warm, honey toned recollections of youth to a bright and sterile future where nothing is not exposed. Flashes of red violently contort death and life, whereas the oppositional blue deeply portrays words and feelings covered and unexpressed.
The pace of the performance quickens as it reaches its finale, the red lights grow stronger, blood stains splatter where once was clean, and everything seems to fall around us in sickening force. The rapacious cyclical strength of pressures beyond the characters control binds us to them, as they sink into self-fulfilled prophecies.
The contrasting calmness as we reflect on the failed potential of Zelda and Esther’s shared life is almost more disturbing than the tangible violence. It is painfully unactualized, as ultimately the calamitous and ravaging failures of doomed youth swallow life and love in a single dying scream.
Image provided via EUTC Bedlam Theatre Press Release