WILD SWIMMING
How fast could you change from underpants to doublet and hose, or slip on a crinoline with 100 pair of eyes watching you? These may be challenges you have rarely if ever had to face but surely world records in those sartorial categories were broken last night at the Corpus Playroom.
‘Wild Swimming’ is a one-hour play set on Dorset beach over several centuries. Here on the sands we meet Nell and Oscar who as a prologue regaled the audience with free chocolates and lively banter. Marek Horn’s beautifully written two-hander plunges (note the aquatic wording here) straight into the lives of a young couple whose relationship is to say the least strained. They are firmly in the ‘can’t live with and can’t live without’ category and Horn’s writing creates two very diverse characters: she witty and acerbic with a fierce tongue, he a dreamy would-be poet and adventurer who finds it hard to get off his beach towel. Metaphors of the sea, water, swimming, and the Hellespont abound. Here the two characters are both waving AND drowning.
The play excitingly plays fast and loose with time. And why not? Thus the first scene has our pair comically dressing in Jacobean costume and we are told it is 1610 or thereabouts. But the language, as it is throughout, is utterly 21st century with four-letter expletives raining down like a verbal shower. Or like a shower of water pistols since we the audience were armed with them to give, at a signal, the two actors a good seaside drenching.
The piece smashes the fourth wall to smithereens (whatever they are) and there is a real commedia dell’ arte atmosphere to punctuate what becomes an increasingly darker narrative. Oscar and Nell stay the same people as time melts into Victorian England, post World War One Dorset and the present day. It is a very fresh and fascinating conceit.
The two actors here: Catriona Clarke and Matt Bairstow gave a first rate performance: full of embittered energy for her and doleful loss for him. They handled the vortex of language with ease and played the audience with wonderful confidence switching the mood from knockabout comedy to heart-rending sadness. It was a gripping 60 minutes fluidly directed by Cat Nicol of Between the Bars company. It is another great example of the sheer rising tide of theatre talent in our city. And now to add to this rock pool of riches we have two of Cambridge’s very best quick-change artists.
