Collaborator reveals the beauty of a lifelong creative partnership through honesty, balance and shared momentum.
Collaborator at The Place is one of those rare shows that wins you over not through spectacle, but through openness. Performed by Charlotte Mooney and Alex Harvey of Ockham’s Razor, it quietly exposes a long creative and personal relationship, laying it bare with a simplicity that feels both deliberate and disarming. What struck me most was the sincerity of it all: no theatrical bravado, no circus gloss to distract from what is, at heart, two people trusting each other completely on stage and in life.
Mooney and Harvey tell their story plainly. They met decades ago while training in circus, fell in love, and famously vowed never to work together. That promise, inevitably broken, became the foundation of Ockham’s Razor and a shared artistic life. Collaborator feels like a reflective pause near the end of that performing journey. It is not nostalgic, but attentive. There is vulnerability in allowing an audience to witness not just success, but friction, misalignment, doubt. Juxtaposed with their obvious physical strength and control, that emotional exposure gives the show an unexpected wholesomeness: tenderness delivered by bodies capable of astonishing feats.
The structure unfolds like a series of chapters rather than acts, each with its own physical language and emotional temperature. Games with ropes, frames, and pendulum-like apparatuses become metaphors for shared momentum, resistance, and balance. Waves recur as an image : energy travelling, echoing, sometimes cancelling itself out. These ideas culminate in the final section, The Days We Will Miss, which shifts the piece into a more reflective register. Here, past and future seem to fold into one another. Time loosens. The sense is not of looking back with regret, but of acknowledging how art, like relationships, constantly rearranges its own timelines.
The music plays a crucial role in guiding those shifts. It never overwhelms the action, instead shaping the emotional contour of each section with restraint. In darker passages, during the moments of disconnection, exhaustion, or strain, the soundscape deepens. It feels carefully calibrated, in dialogue with the movement rather than sitting on top of it.
Visually, the design choices are deceptively grounded. Costumes sit in earthy, natural tones, rooting the performers firmly on the ground even as they repeatedly leave it. That contrast : bodies dressed for the everyday, then lifted, swung, suspended, heightens the sense of flight.
Collaborator isn’t about virtuosity for its own sake. It’s about attention: to another person, to shared history, to the quiet labour of staying in sync. By the end, what stay with the audience is not a single trick or image, but the feeling of having been invited into something honest, a collaboration in the truest sense.