A piece with lots of unexplored potential, lifted by great performances
‘Little Deaths’, part of Greater Manchester’s Fringe, shows a series of snapshots of a toxic relationship as SHE (Filipa Pereira) attempts to work through her memories of what happened. Pereira’s performance is easily the best part of Little Deaths, along with Shlok Shetty, who gives a great performance as JACK. The two of them are captivating. When they get the chance to interact with one another, their chemistry is clear and thrilling. The layers Shetty brings to his performance feel particularly rare for the type of role he’s playing, subtly bringing out the insecurities around class and the way he’s perceived by those around him.
Watching drunk people has never been particularly interesting, and Little Deaths doesn’t do too much to challenge that, especially in the first half. All the performers have a good sense of comedic timing, and Dionne Hunter’s direction has them moving around the stage and audience in exciting ways. Unfortunately, some moments (where performers are sat on the floor) are invisible to most of the audience. The lighting and costumes mostly just do their jobs unintrusively, with a relatively simple stage: a sofa and table with decorations; towards the end the sofa becomes a bed.
The script is on the nose at times, but writer Isabelle Palmer is very good at adding in lots of implications about the relationships between the characters, even if most of these are never explored. The tonal changes from comedic to uneasy are slickly done and do a good job of bringing home the key themes of the play. It’s the latter atmosphere that’s consistently of better quality, perhaps because it’s where Shetty and Pereira’s strengths are. The other characters, Rachel and Carrie, could be much more developed, although they play off against each other nicely, especially in their introductory scene.
Similarly, elements like the sound and lights could have been developed to a much greater extent. The use of musical motifs, for example, would have been more impactful if the sound design was present for more of the play, giving the repetition something to stand out against. The sparseness of the music, like the set design, feels underutilised rather than deliberately minimal. But all of this improves significantly after the interval, really lifting the piece as a whole. The first half isn’t really strong enough to stand alone, though, leaving the excitement of the premise delayed for too long.
That said, the two interludes which bookend the first half, where Pereira recites the monologue from which ‘Little Deaths’ began, are a fascinating contrast to the rest of the play. Her energy takes on a different, perhaps more frenetic tone in the isolation of those sequences than elsewhere. It’s a shame these are abandoned in the second half, especially given the additional agency SHE could have had if the consequences of her journey through her memories had been explored. The elliptical, cyclical, and occasionally non-linear, structure created by the flashbacks works really well, especially when moments begin to be repeated and subverted after the interval. The slight changes in dialogue between the two halves of the play are really interesting to puzzle through, and are where the deliberate ambiguity of ‘Little Deaths’ tends to work best. Again, though, they are never really expanded on, leaving them as interesting character details with no real narrative consequence.All of this means the lack of resolution feels disappointing, rather than ambiguous or open to interpretation in an interesting way. The final scene feels misplaced, especially after the brilliant scene coming before it where we see SHE and JACK meet for the first time.
Indeed, there are several great moments throughout ‘Little Deaths’, many of which could have and should have lasted longer. In particular, it would have been great if the spiking scene was more developed, with the change in sound design and lighting incredibly effective at conveying SHE’s confusion at what’s happening. Ultimately, ‘Little Deaths’ has an interesting premise and lots of potential, but the star performances are doing a lot of work to cover up other underutilised elements.
‘Little Deaths’ was performed at the King’s Arms, Salford, as part of the Greater Manchester Fringe on Sunday 19th July.