A young man walks to the stage, turns and greets us warmly. He tells us that he has just met someone he hasn’t seen for many years, and he cannot quite recall her name.  This leads him to ponder his current situation, and we discover that he is struggling to come to terms with the break-up of a relationship. Friends are supportive, but he feels adrift. Nic McQuillan’s Ebb is a very affecting monologue about the end of love, the power of imagination, and the fragility of memory. McQuillan portrays someone bemused to discover he can no longer recall his ‘ex’ in detail, so his emotions are becoming unattached from anything concrete: ‘I’m losing the specificity of you.’ He projects these unfocused feelings onto the items of furniture that they once shared; he finds something comforting in the moodiness of the sofa and the chest-of-drawers. His tone is generally wryly introspective, rising to anger just once when he wonders ‘What was the point of being ‘us’?’  He bitterly wonders if the risk of embarking upon a relationship is ever justified by the reward.

Interwoven with these poignant musings about the loss of love is a description of his job. We learn that this involves him re-writing the LinkedIn profiles for clients who work in hi-tech industries. From the few flat details that he is given he creates convincing, three-dimensional personalities, though he has little or no understanding of the work they do.  He is bewildered by all the acronyms and the management-speak; just what a ‘Global Transformation Team’ does is beyond him. He speculates about one client, ‘Paul’, in considerable physical detail, ruefully acknowledging that his imagined picture of a client he has never met is proving more robust than his memory of the woman he once knew intimately, but who is now ‘beginning to melt.’

As an actor McQuillan is thoroughly engaging, and his writing is often vivid: when recalling a holiday on a Mediterranean beach he describes the calm sea as being like ‘cling film stretched across diamonds.’  Although Ebb is shot through with a profound sense of sadness, it is by no means a wallow in self-pity.  Often amusing, it has an upward trajectory that leads to a satisfyingly positive conclusion.  The simple set consists of scattered lamps, and at the end they are all shining brightly. Catch tonight’s performance if you can.    ★★★★☆   Mike Whitton   9^th June 2017