Looking for Giants holds promise, but has yet to pull new wisdom from the depths of pain it plumbs.
As much as Looking For Giants —- a one-woman show playing at the King’s Head Theatre after a successful Edinburgh run —- pulls off the magic of activating the audience’s imagination, it does so seemingly for the thrill of it, getting lost in the sauce of its own preciousness. Watching it felt like rubbing a bruise just to admire its colors.
The “giants” of the play’s title are the people who leave marks on us — the fleeting relationships that turn into seemingly pointless, yet obsessive, fantasies. In the narrator’s first few words: “There’s no way you can avoid them. And though you sometimes wish these people weren’t so huge, or that they weren’t even there in the first place, they keep you company somehow.”
The piece’s message is clear, but it never changes. The first ideas presented aren’t pushed towards new regions of insight or emotion.
Narrated by the talented young Glaswegian actress Abby McCann and written and directed by Cesca Echlin, the play is divided into three stories of obsessive fantasy. The Narrator recounts the memories of three men of whom she’s made “giants” in her life. Beginning with a postgraduate tutor, then a dating app match, and culminating with a school crush, these relationships each technically fail. In reality, they proffer nothing. But on the inside, they mean everything.
With nothing but a stool and a microphone (and complex lighting and sound that too often clash with her remarkably peeled-back performance), McCann effectively opens up the audience. She expertly pulses the text, lulling attention to the silences and then to our own memories. At one point, one could practically hear each of our own ghostly giants entering the theatre and lining up along the walls, like latecomers to a play.
The narrator says of these ghosts, “These are the people who have come to mean something to you… When you look down, you see they’ve left these invisible marks on your body, which only you know are there. When you are alone you can press down on them.”
Giants is not a vanity piece, but its preoccupation with pressing these “invisible marks” ultimately flattens it. With no energy left to guide its audience’s emotional memories to new realms of discovery and self-awareness, it coasts on the same plane, bookended by the same argument with which it begins: that these giants of impassioned, inflated memory will inevitably cause us perpetual pain… but they can also be fulfilling ‘company” too.
For a play that predominantly tackles gender dynamics in the romantic and sexual life of a young woman, it was surprising to be presented with such a positive spin on very toxic intimate relationships. Yes, maybe someone can swoop in and change a person’s life in a matter of moments, but none of these three stories convincingly presents evidence that this kind of “exciting” suffering makes anything better. The play falls short of demonstrating how this “company” is indeed fulfilling. There is certainly an argument to be made there, but the production hasn’t quite teased it out yet.
Looking for Giants holds promise, but has yet to pull new wisdom from the depths of pain it plumbs.