Rating: ●●●●○

This Beach is a play with a clear message that pervades strong performances and over the top, eccentric stage effects. These effects, and the convincing dramatics, show us how we deal with ideas of territory, and how we are reluctant to share paradise with anyone.

Arriving at Project Arts Centre, you see a thinly veiled curtain, masking a yellow-based stage. The curtain draws back to a beach with four characters dressed in white hazmat suits and one lifeless body on stage. The lifeless body is dragged to the back of the stage and cramped into a dusty grey container. One of the characters throws a match into it and closes the door; smoke whispers out of the container as the characters take off their suits and appear as normal human beings. This ominous opening gives an unsettling and bizarre taste of what is to come.

Despite this eerie opening, the play introduces us to the European family who own this private beach. They are entirely brainwashed in their own idea of the perfect private haven. They have each other, they have beer, and they have sunshine, so why would they go anywhere else? They don’t need any other ideas, culture, or people. That is until a mysterious body washes up on the beach. The body appears lifeless at first and we assume it will be burned like the previous body, until the boy coughs for breath and the family are taken aback. Each member of the family reacts to the refugee in different ways; some are hostile, some wish to use him to raise their own profile, some wish to use him for labour, some wish to seduce him.

This reflects the central theme of the play; how we, as Western society, react in different ways to those who are outside of our immediate comfort zone. This message is definitely carried, although sometimes blurred with the use of the unusual, from contorted dancing and live camera recording projected onto the stage. The strangeness is, at times, overwhelming, but overall the play succeeds in leaving the audience with an unsettling feeling of the family having abused their power over the refugee.

 

This Beach is presented by Brokentalkers and co-produced by the Project Arts Centre.