The Vault Festival is quickly becoming an essential part of London’s fringe theatre scene – there’s excitement in both the unusual locations of the plays (The Vaults run under Waterloo Station), and the disparate range of talent on show in these underground spaces. In ‘Cavern’, a damp ambiently lit space where trains rumble overhead we meet Jade and Liam, two troubled young people trying to make sense of themselves and the world. Their flat is littered with empty cans and debris, shopping trolleys rain from the skies and the lift smells of cat piss. There’s a hint of violence and the suggestion that the outside world is not a safe place. Jade talks of going out but never goes further than the kitchen.
Jade (Charlotte Jane Higgins) is complex, bright, and chaotic. Articulate and vivid she’s scared and jittery. She relies on drink, pills and Liam to keep her balanced. Sometimes she’s needy, other times dismissive or ambivalent. She doesn’t know what she wants, but she knows this isn’t it. Liam (Arthur McBain) seems well-meaning but we’re not quite sure how he got dragged into all of this. He drinks too much too, and can’t find work, but he seems to have some semblance of a normal life on the outside, yet he keeps coming back to Jade and her ‘nest’. Of course, there are young people living like this, and Warner’s ‘spotlight on the forgotten’ is an important one, but Jade and Liam are hard to connect with and it’s sometimes difficult to understand the nature of their relationship – although that confusion might be part of Warner’s point – that life is messy, complex and often confusing.
The writing is sharp and sometimes funny, Warner captures Jade’s fractured memory well and the direction is tight and performances nuanced and energetic enough to keep the play moving, though I yearned for more variation in pace or mood, but again maybe that’s the point, that each day is like the other.
Nest was shortlisted for the Theatre 503 Playwriting Award and Live Theatre’s Live Lab bursary and Katy Warner is an emerging playwright worth watching out for.
Review by Roz Wyllie
“They made beautiful patterns in the sky and then just disappeared.”
Jade is alone, always alone, until one night Liam accidently knocks on her door looking for a party. What he finds is more beautiful then he could ever imagine, yet it might just break them both. Set against an isolated council estate, NEST is the beautifully messy love story of two people forgotten by society, with nowhere left to turn but to each other.
ARTISTIC TEAM
WRITTEN BY Katy Warner
DIRECTED BY Yasmeen Arden
DESIGNER Holly Pigott
LIGHTING DESIGNER Zoe Spurr
SOUND DESIGNER Jac Cooper
DESIGN ASSISTANT Victoria Maytom
STAGE MANAGER Isabella Brain
PRODUCED BY Robyn Bennett
PRODUCTION IMAGE BY Iona Macleod Photography
CAST:
JADE – Charlotte Jane Higgins
LIAM – Arthur McBain
28 Feb — 04 Mar 18:00
SUITABILITY: 15+
https://www.wearevault.org/
