Shed: Exploded View review
Formally ambitious exploration of love and violence
In Cornelia Parker’s installation Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, suspended fragments are illuminated, casting shadows across the space. So it is with Phoebe Eclair-Powell’s Bruntwood Prize-winning play. Inspired by Parker’s artwork, which was constructed from the pieces of an exploded garden shed, Shed: Exploded View shatters and reassembles time, leaving us to pick through the wreckage.
It is an apt shape for a play about multiple forms of violence. The narrative is as broken as the glass that repeatedly smashes. This is just one of the recurring images tying together three couples: Lil and Tony, taking another – in Tony’s case, third – stab at love and marriage; Naomi and Frank, who seem fatally out of sync from the start; and their daughter Abi and her volatile partner Mark. Their lives weave in and out of one another as time jumps back and forth over 30 years. They meet, they fall in love, they bicker, they struggle, they break.
The shed of the title feels more like an anchor to Parker’s artwork than an integral part of the stories being told. While there is an actual shed, which hovers centre-stage in Naomi Dawson’s design, its narrative function is somewhat contrived. What is more interesting is how Eclair-Powell has used Parker’s work as a formal inspiration. Across the many short scenes, she holds individual moments up to the light, inviting us to see the darkness thrown by seemingly trivial incidents.
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In Atri Banerjee’s striking staging, these moments accumulate – both figuratively and physically. Cast members write out the titles of scenes in chalk on the revolving black circles of the stage, with more and more words filling up the initially blank space. As the production progresses, chalk starts rubbing off on clothes, suggesting how these small episodes mark the characters. It reinforces the sense that time is fluid, as the past becomes smudged by the present.
To say too much about what happens would be to rub out that delicate accumulation. Through her interlinked trio of couples, Eclair-Powell addresses some of the most painful facets of love, turning attention to illness, caring, grief and abuse. This is movingly portrayed by the cast – especially the three women, who hold together the splintered pieces of the play. Hayley Carmichael’s Lil is quietly devastating, while Norah Lopez Holden manages to convince as child, teenager and adult, showing the evolution of Abi. As Naomi, meanwhile, Lizzy Watts delivers a slow-motion explosion of a performance.
Some scenes land with more weight than others, and different aspects of the complex structure feel more or less convincing. But the play’s combination of formal ambition and emotional grounding is just what competitions like the Bruntwood Prize should be all about.
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