The Made in Bristol project is a scheme run by Bristol Old Vic that enables 18-25 year olds to gain expertise and experience in a wide range of theatre skills. This year’s group is called Splint Theatre, and Out Of Sky is their debut production. It begins with a scene of bucolic merriment. A narrator invites us to ‘envisage a village’ set in an Eden-like ‘landscape of perfection’. His language is intensely lyrical, full of rhyme, alliteration and inventive imagery. The villagers are cheerful innocents with flowers in their hair, rather like figures from a Stanley Spencer painting, and their social life revolves around rather eccentric choir-singing. But all is not well in this paradise. One family has a much-loved but discontented son, Merryn – ‘nothing’s working and I don’t know what’s wrong.’ Neither his parents nor his sister Isla can fathom his angst. Stepping through a jagged-edged gap in the scenery, he disappears into darkness. A rebellious runaway? A teenage suicide? We are not told, but his departure brings a scream of despair from his mother, and the sky vanishes.
What follows is an exploration of loss and of grief, told in the form of a myth or folk tale. The villagers fall under the influence of a self-proclaimed Mayor who is confident that her ‘new sky competition’ will solve their problems. The Mayor’s grandiose speeches are packed with elaborate malapropisms, and both she and the gurning rustics who follow her are entirely comic figures. Their efforts to create a new sky are presented as gloriously daft buffoonery. In stark contrast, Merryn’s shattered family is portrayed realistically; his mother descends into near catatonic depression, and Isla expresses her anger and frustration in very down-to-earth terms. A brave feature of Out Of Sky is this juxtaposing of surreal clowning with a straightforward portrayal of a family’s personal tragedy. These collisions of contrasting styles are echoed in the switching back and forth in the language from high-flown poetic fantasy to unadorned everyday speech. At times the sudden shifts in tone are rather disconcerting, but I rather liked the theatrical chutzpah of it all. In one moment Out Of Sky resembles some kind of exotic tribal ritual, and in the next we are in much more familiar domestic territory.
Kate Alhadeff gives a touching performance as the bewildered, grief-stricken mother, and Dorothy Collins is entirely convincing as Isla, made both angry and sad by her brother’s disappearance and resenting her status as the less-favoured sibling. Alex Dickinson is both Merryn and the narrator, and he delivers his often whimsical, whirling words with an appealing intensity. Alex is Out Of Sky’s writer, and he clearly has a real understanding of the slippery, elusive nature of language. He also has a love of outrageous puns – I particularly liked the sky-eating whale that has ‘krilled us all’. Despite its dark theme, Out Of Sky has a celebratory feel, fueled by the young actors’ obvious joy in performing. Co-directed by Julia Head and Jack Orozco Morrison, this play is packed with an extraordinary variety of images and ideas, perhaps a little too much so, but they and their talented writer should be congratulated for such inventiveness and ambition. All of Splint Theatre should be very proud of what they have achieved. ★★★★☆ Mike Whitton 22nd July 2016
Photo Credit: Paul Blakemore
