FringeReview UK 2024
Meet Me at Dawn
Stables Theatre Hastings
Genre: Contemporary, Drama, Fringe Theatre, Short Plays, Theatre
Venue: Stables Theatre Hastings
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
“There is a strange place called grief, and all the rules have changed.” Zinnie Harris ‘s 2017 play Meet Me at Dawn is directed by Sam Chittenden at Stables Theatre Hastings till October 5th.
An aching, unflinching look at what we might face. Yet few seek to live through such a pact as bestowed here. A Greek gift. Unmissable in the south east.
Till October 5th
Review
“There is a strange place called grief, and all the rules have changed.” Two women Robyn (Deborah Kearne) and Helen (Tamara Leggett) have just escaped a boating accident and Robyn’s concussed. Helen, full of one-liners with a scientist’s rationale, is worried Robyn’s hallucinating. All isn’t what it seems; yet might be. Zinnie Harris ‘s 2017 play Meet Me at Dawn is directed by Sam Chittenden at Stables Theatre Hastings till October 5th.
The partners pace on a desolate beach with wrack foregrounded, that turn out curiously jerry-built chairs. Are they on an island? They can’t see their car, left near the incompetent boat-lender’s quay. Dee Harvey’s bleak set slowly yields its riches. Helen inscribes SOS in the fine sand, sand that runs through their fingers. Jonathan Richardson’s light beats down in a space shrouded in hazed sky behind. The backdrops beats an uncertain summer and its pall. Dave Rowland’s sound of beach surf is inaudible from the front row.
The title seems a challenge. But who is issuing it? The couple try to work out who a woman they encounter is. More distrait than stray. Before stalking off she keeps throwing back their questions and hasn’t got a phone. Robyn’s was lost.
Robyn’s vomiting too; Helen’s worried she might be in the early stages of something. There’s only a single pastel sweet, Helen’s favourite, Helen gives to Robyn to boost her blood sugar. Helen touches her head, finds blood on her fingers. It’s a shocking moment. Robyn makes claims that frighten Helen. “What do you do when you are marooned on a tiny sandbank with your girlfriend and she starts to go crazy? That is a question for you angels.”
Harris’s plays often involve a political twist on just such a beach. Farther Than the Farthest Thing from 2000, her second play, won many awards (commended by the world-famous Susan Smith Blackburn Award); and was revived at the Young Vic this March. It explored the consequences on the island of Tristan da Cunha and its inhabitants following a volcanic eruption in 1961. Yet elements seem dream-like.
That’s what Harris brings to this play. It ebbs back and forth, though here this two-hander spins on the stages of two women coming to terms with each other, what’s happened to them. They bicker, love, seethe through stages of grief (five, indeed); Kearne in particular delivers monologues to a fourth wall that seem out of time.
You wonder what life she’s dipping into? A Harry Potter Pensieve perhaps. Or addressing us. But who are we? We might be gods.
Indeed Harris has explored adaptation (retelling Macbeth and The Duchess of Malfi) and Greek myth in the acclaimed This Restless House, based on the Oresteia, the same year as Meet Me at Dawn. Something of Orpheus and Eurydice flickers across the protagonists’ faces, or the heroic Alceste, prepared to do anything for her husband. William Golding’s novel Pincher Martin came to mind after the first 15 minutes, but it isn’t quite that.
Kearne and Leggett are consummate. Leggett is the warm foil to Kearne’s distraught, confused Robyn. She enjoys zinging ripostes and tingling verbal snaps. I’ve not encountered her before. Here Leggett revels as agonised inquisitor, frightened, even outraged by Robyn’s oracular statements but gradually absorbing them: and making that absorption visceral.
Kearne was on superb form recently in the outstanding Homestead at Brighton Open Air Theatre: Conor Baum’s direction of Lorca’s House of Bernarda Alba transposed to midwestern mid-50s America. Here she ramps up grief to a howl that never seems overborne. There’s always somewhere further to go. Kearne shudders out realisations: and fruitlessly tries to hide that from Helen.
Helen though is too shrewd, too gentle. After denials and bargaining, indeed “I hate you” moments they look at what bargains Robyn has made, perhaps with that woman out there. Because one has been struck, and against all odds, granted. Can it save them or are they farther apart than ever? Is their future together illusory?
Chittenden as ever directs with a sure, lyric beat over 75 minutes of Kearne’s and Leggett’s performance: an aching, unflinching look at what we might face. Yet few seek to live through such a pact as bestowed here. A Greek gift. Unmissable in the south east.
Writer Zinnie Harris, Director Sam Chittenden, Stage Manager Nik Roberts, Set Design Dee Harvey Lighting Design Jonathan Richardson, Sound Design Dave Rowland,
Set Build Frank Jenks; Dee Harvey; Peter Harvey; Ian Morson; Jeff Graves; Oliver Morton; Dave Rowland; Samantha Shulver; Jack Welling, Photography Peter Mould, Poster Design Cliff Brooker, PAG Liaison Annie Edwards
Music Ruby Colley The Sea Wrote It, Charles Trent la Mer sung by Chantal Chamberland
Thanks to Box Office, Neil Sellman, Ben Randall and the PAG
Till October 5th
