Review: Lucy and the Hawk, Ovalhouse

Written for Culture Wars

In science, dissociation involves splitting molecules into their component parts: an individual object blasted apart. In life, it’s a state of disconnection. It can be mild – a nagging aloofness – or extremely debilitating and psychologically paralysing. Dissociative individuals can seem to stand outside of themselves; onlookers on their own lives.

Phil Ormrod’s interwoven diptych suggests this to be a fairly standard condition of modern life. Its protagonists live exploded and fragmentary lives, almost cubist existences of components stitched together or seen from all angles at once. Their thoughts exist on one plane and their actions on another. And the world itself has all but disappeared.

All this is carried through form more than narrative. Lucy (Abigail Moffatt), as glazed as a donut, livens the brain-death of her call-centre job with Amelie-esque flights of fancy. She’s tripped into a Kafkaesque tailspin when her own phone starts ringing ceaselessly. On the other end is a man seeking someone else who refuses to take no for an answer, and her sense of self begins to slide.

Her opposite number is an unnamed wood-worker (Tom Walton) obsessed with flight after catching sight of a hawk. Like some latterday, lesser Leonardo da Vinci, he’s constantly totting up the optimum dimensions for the perfect kite to match his aerial rival.

Ormrod plays these scenes so that they seem dislocated. The majority of the action is mimed – or at least sparsely furnished – while the other performer concocts appropriate sound effects offstage using foley techniques. When a bird flutters into the scene, for example, a rubber glove is shaken offstage; it’s fingers ruffling like feathers. The central characters’ thoughts – a dense tangle of text (I hate the word, but some would call it pretentious), half-mechanical, half-maniacal, is spoken with a self-help tone – drift in through a microphone. It’s always in the second person, as if the ghost in the machine is somehow using voice-activation technology to control the self. Cecilia Carey’s angular, sloping set, in front of a backdrop like cracked ice, furthers that jagged cubist quality.

The effect is to split one’s concentration. You’re constantly trying to decode the mimed actions or the sound effects, to add them into a whole for a sense of narrative. It’s too cacophonous and restless to be taken in all together, so that our out flitting attention matches the distraction and preoccupation of both characters. That’s furthered by the sense that the performance’s own rules – it mixes live and recorded sound, for example – aren’t quite consistent. And yet, when it distils or settles, it’s capable of genuinely affecting little moments.

Yet, there’s always a sense that you’re missing something central, something crucial, that it would all fall into place, if only you could unlock it. Tonally, largely thanks to Nick Williams' soft soundtrack (think the xx covering Yann Tierson), you start with an expectation of kooky romance; that the two oddballs will somehow meet. Yet it never quite becomes clear where we’re going.

Understanding a play is a process of sifting, of panning through a mass of signs and information to identify meaningful or connecting threads. It’s a bit like tapping Jenga blocks to see what gives. Here, it felt like something was slipping through the sieve, like some block wasn’t moving; that there must have been something more – or more precise – than this sensation of disorientation. Are the two connected? Do their stories reveal one another or just echo? On the whole, for all that sensation cleverly matches subject cleverly, I found Lucy and the Hawk a rather frustrating watch.

Photograph: