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Etcetera Theatre, London, EUR >>>

2007

Essential Collective Theatre Company

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chamber theatre

Play/Drama

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1

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Notes:
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Synopsis:
It began in Ontario, when an actress asked playwright Jason Cadieux to write something 'with just me and a stool', and from such humble beginnings it's become something subtly devastating. Central to its imagery is the Ironman Triathlon, in which a young woman is competing to blot out the pain of her husband's death. Yet there's nothing bleak about this hour-long monologue - it's an enjoyably artful piece of theatrical storytelling, which certainly deserves larger audiences than were there the night I went to see it. Stephanie Jones first appears - as she requested -crouching on a stool in suffocating darkness. As the lights rise she tells a story about the first time she fainted. It's in a biology class at school, where a dummy called George is having all his organs unhooked from inside his body. She volunteers to be the child who puts back his heart, but once she's holding it she panics and blacks out. Strangely, as in Tim Crouch's 'An Oak Tree', the death central to the narrative takes place when a car crushes a pedestrian (here her husband training for the marathon) against an oak tree. '17.5' is very different, but comes from a similar tradition of serious playfulness. Interspersed between such lightly comic stories as her first fainting incident are simple spellbinding effects. A fishtank lit green from underneath becomes the pool where she met her husband, a tiny toy car helps recreate his death.
- Rachel Halliburton, Time Out London