If you’ve never learned to swim, what would push you to try?
Tony Craze award winning playwright Somebody Jones’ debut play, “How I Learned to Swim”, is a slick one-woman play delving into the life of one black woman deals with the past, both recent and timeless, to come to terms with loss and failure.
Directed by Emma Jude Harris, this piece transforms the Roundabout at Summerhall into an amalgamation of water worlds. From the stage design by Debbie Duru, which manifests an uncannily real block of a tiled swimming pool deck, to the sound design by Nicola T. Chang which smoothly transitions from one location to another with effortlessly realistic sound bites of water, sloshing and being dived into.
We follow actor Frankie Hart’s Jamie, a woman just turned 30 who has never learned to swim and enlists a confident instructor, Molly, to finally teach her. Her fears of the water have always been deep seeded, but this need to overcome her fears travels deeper her immediate family and further into her own peoples’ history.
Hart captivates the stage with an ease that is something to behold. Her prowess for slipping between characters while still carrying the emotional resonance that is needed for a main character such as Jamie is an impressive feat. Jones’ storytelling is nimble and fluid, almost as if her dialogue glides swiftly through the waters.
The play shines when it begins to lose its reality to light surrealism, all helped by the expert design and rollicking pace that holds the audience’s attention for the entire runtime. A must see for anyone who needs a thought-provoking, spiritual experience.