When the so called ‘Great Storm’ hit the south east of England
in October 1987 I had just started as a trainee manager for J Sainsbury and was
based in Horsham in Sussex. I don’t remember the storm itself, I must have
slept through it, but I do remember arriving at work to see a huge queue of
people outside the store. It turns out that the loading bay had blown in and
couldn’t be opened, so we were unloading the trucks through a fire door, and
this was limiting us to the amount of customers we could allow in the store at
a time. Most of Horsham was without power, and would continue like that for
three or four days, so demand for candles, matches, and tinned goods was huge.
Watching the news that night, and seeing the devastation that had been wrought
over large areas of the south east, felt quite surreal.
Idle Motion’s The Seagull Effect, told in a combination of
narrative and physical theatre, takes us back to that night via a nicely conceived
backwards dash through some major events of the last 25 years, which made me
feel very old indeed. But, once it reaches the night of the storm it chooses not
to focus on the big events, but the stories of individuals on that night,
primarily the narrator (Grace Chapman), travelling to Brighton for a job interview,
and a former couple (Joel Gatehouse and Kate Stanley) who are temporarily reunited
by events and revisit their relationship over the course of the night.
The
piece explores the journeys that we take in our lives, and how impossible it is
to have certainty in their outcomes, how shared experiences can bring us
together and how seemingly disparate events can be connected, contrasting that
with the theories published by Edward Lorenz, mathematician and meteorologist,
that minute changes in weather models (the flap of a seagull’s wings of the
title) can result in huge variances in outcomes.
The show is beautifully put together, the cast of six
bringing together an interesting and thought provoking narrative, precisely
choreographed movement, and some clever and original use of projection and
sound, to result in a moving and quite beautiful hour’s entertainment.
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