THEATRE

Performed on alternate days with PlayON’s other fringe show ‘Stacy’ as part of their ‘Lost Ones Season’; Debris by Dennis Kelly is an ‘in-yer-face’ drama exploring the perverse lives of Brother and Sister Michael and Michelle, in a shattered family with unrelenting torment and underpinned with natal obsession. Both children are fixated on their birth right with morose intent and understandable angst, which has been ingrained in their ‘detrimental childhood’.

The two actors; Lily Knight and Will Hughes are aesthetically a good sibling-ly match and in an intensely personal play, the duo are a complementary partnership. The two maintained character throughout as the play alternated monologues so their stage presence was strong. And notably, Knight played a very endearing innocence as the sister, which was quite beautiful to watch her capture a child-like softness to her wide-eyed stare, if slightly off-putting. Sadly, this attention slipped slightly in her own monologues, and i felt this was the case for the pair of them; that unusually, they shone when the other was speaking. They were incredibly engaging as physical performers, but struggled to convey the same strength of character in their speech. Nevertheless, they maintained solid performances.

For the aforementioned reasons, I wasn’t really convinced by the vulnerability of their characters. Despite their troubled lives, their characterisation was unusually gutsy from the start. This was most notably captured by Hughes’ brazen eye contact with the audience in such an intimate space as we entered the room. This was perhaps ill-befitting to the plays content, but an interesting interpretation either directorial or scriptural.  They adopted a surprisingly strong disposition, when i felt they needed to be more spiritually broken, instead they came across as twitchy and socially awkward, but needed greater depth. They captured the child-like nature well, but didn’t quite connect with the degenerate lifestyle, so that as an audience member, i could not quite suspend my disbelief far enough.

I didn’t really feel emotionally effected by it, and was more tormented by the white noise from the TV’s incorporated in the set (used effectively with footage of birthing imagery), but which began to give me a headache. Hughes did give a very strong performance whilst recounting the story of the baby found amongst a pile of rubbish, and his immediate emotional and physical attachment to the child was touching to watch and disturbing in equal measure, but he lacked the subtlety and delicate quality which Knight exuded, and remained slightly too frantic. Overall this was a solid show, but lacked the poignancy which it had clear potential to achieve.