An intimate night of storytelling that at times felt a bit too predictable and slow.
Cold, Dark Matters tells the story of a Cornish shed that gets blown up – but really it is the story of the agony of trying to fit into close-knit communities. The play follows the life of Colin, a writer that has just moved to a rural area of Cornwall and the extreme lengths that he goes to in order to be accepted. The play evokes the crazed frustration that loneliness and feeling like an outsider can bring.
Written and performed by the energetic Jack Brownridge Kelly, playing both himself and multiple other characters, Cold, Dark Matters is an intimate night of storytelling. Switching almost always seamlessly between characters, Jack Brownridge Kelly doesn’t, as many one-person shows do, leave you hoping for another actor to enter the stage. The audience are guided between disbelief and belief, until you aren’t quite sure what is real and what is made up.
However, although proclaiming to be a ‘dark satire’, Cold, Dark Matters struggles to have many moments of comedic relief, or to achieve many laughs. Brownridge Kelly is an engaging storyteller, but the story he’s telling is at times hard to find engaging. The script is often predictable, and some strands of the narrative fail to be resolved or developed leaving you confused as to why they were first introduced. Perhaps the local audience in Mousehole, Cornwall where the play was first performed, would have had a stronger connection to the story than those in London’s Hope theatre, which Brownridge Kelly mentions a few too many times, bringing us unnecessarily back into the space.
An odd idea for a play, which is at times predictable and slow. Nonetheless Jack Brownridge Kelly does a good job of bringing to life these whacky characters, to the point where you forget there is only one person on stage, with only a bag for life, some gloves and fragments of a shed to help him.
REVIEWER: Ruby Kay