Indiana Lown-Collins’ revival of Jack Thorne’s hilarious, devastating insight into a relationship proves a triumphant amplification of disabled voices – a stunning work of theatre.
Jack Thorne may be known best to the readers of A Young(ish) Perspective as the writer behind Skins, with his screenwriting credits also including This is England, Cast Offs and Enola Holmes. His theatre credentials include Let The Right One In, A Christmas Carol and Junkyard. The Solid Life of Sugar Water was first produced by Graeae Theatre Company in 2016, moving on to the Edinburgh Fringe and The National Theatre before a halt in productions in the UK. Thorne stipulated that the actor playing Alice had to be deaf, ‘and no one seemingly could make that work’. Director Indiana Lown-Collins chose Sugar Water as her entry to the JMK Award, which allows up-and-coming directors to stage a professional production of a play of their choice. As the 2022 winner, she triumphantly brings Thorne’s exceptional piece of writing back to the stage.
Playing at Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre until the 12th November, Sugar Water delves into the relationship between Alice (Katie Erich) and Phil (Adam Fenton), with no painful, cringeworthy or intimate detail left unshared. Revolving around their horrific experience of Alice’s stillbirth, the play sheds light on a topic that often goes unspoken, with 2,597 babies dying from stillbirth in 2021 and yet little being heard on the issue. Lown-Collins speaks of the importance of what this play helps to do, to give people a platform to ‘say their baby’s name if they wish to, or share their story’.
Despite the gravity of the subject matter, a great deal of the experience of watching this production is made up of laughter – Thorne’s writing is witty and razor-sharp, and our two actors are singularly talented, at once hilarious, endearing and able to carry the emotional weight of their characters’ pain. Focal to Ica Niemz’s masterful set design is a bed, alternately made and unmade as the couple reveal the twists and turns of their connection, with crumpled off-white sheets not unreminiscent of Tracey Emin’s. Aptly, the bed later provides a comical demonstration of the kind of modern art Phil is at a loss to describe when on a date with Alice at a gallery, a ball of burst-pillow feathers perched atop a pile of linen becoming a piece he feels pressure to comment on insightfully: ‘it says the artist slept with his sister then killed his mother…interesting…’
The stalls were often riotous with fits of yelping as the couple describe the messy, awkward sexual truths of their relationship. This is how people really have sex, presented in a realm far from the glossy exploits of mainstream pornography, and it is a reminder that this kind of honesty is not seen enough, in how wonderful their clumsy endeavours are, the audience sharing bursts of joyful, vocal recognition. You can’t help but root for them both, and indeed Alice describes Phil in this way – that ‘you want him to do well’. She expresses her pleasant surprise at their first sleeping together, musing ‘well, he’s a tigger – and once you fuck a tigger, there’s no going back.’
Phil tends to take centre stage due to this energy – it’s hard to draw away from such frenetic charisma. Because of this, one initially wonders about Alice’s depths, the dreams and pain that get swept up in Phil’s sparkiness. Yet it is Phil who turns his head towards Alice in the final scene, lying side by side on the bed, and his pure devotion to her is clear throughout. Alice switches to signing in the aftermath of her time in hospital, and expresses herself powerfully, full of exhausted emotion. The bed has a transparent frame beneath it, bands of lights with clever mirror placement seeming to refract forever below, and where elsewhere these may suggest untold personal depths, here they become a feat of symmetry. The inner lives of both characters are explored exquisitely above, Sugar Water a clear window into their personhood.
The intimacy of the production is potent, all the more so for occasionally catching the eye of someone across the theatre in the round witnessing the same private scene as you, heightening your awareness of the voyeuristic element of watching Sugar Water. Such is the truth of the play’s depiction of a relationship, with the couple’s meet-cute becoming symbolic of these themes of honesty and intimacy. Alice finds herself behind Phil in the line for the post office, who is posting a comically large package (‘NO METAPHOR’, Alice insists), which inevitably explodes, revealing its mixed contents, some less kosher than one might like to be laid bare before the clientele of your local post office. However, everyone helps to pick up the pieces, including Alice. There is connection in the aftermath of that messy human mistake, of Phil’s quirks and hang ups and private sense of humour being exposed, his socially acceptable veneer shattered in an act of faux pas – and here, that vulnerability leads very quickly to love.
An extraordinary exploration of life and loss, which does the vital work of placing disabled voices at the heart of the narrative, something which is not yet seen nearly enough in the arts – an essential watch.