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"Ineffable" by Maya Barter, Charlie Hall, Death, Edinburgh Fringe, Grief, Grieving, Maya Barter, Nancy Lambert, Queen Mary Theatre Company, Remi Shorunke Samuel, Space on Jeffrey Street, Theatre Review, Tulpa, Zohaib Sajjad
[The following contains spoilers.]
“Ineffable” has been written by Maya Barter and it is here from the Queen Mary University of London. It is currently established at theSpace @ Venue45. Blue (Remi Shorunke Samuel) is grieving for Sarah, a friend who had drowned in a swimming accident. Blue bears a technical responsibility for this accident, since she had been the one who had put the thought of swimming into Sarah’s head. During this short play, Blue makes her peace with Sarah’s sister Rosie (Nancy Lambert) and then with Sarah herself (Charlie Hall).
This is a lovely piece of theatre but there is an increasingly elven quality to its playfulness. There are house spirits: gentle and only very mildly sinister beings who flit about the stage and make inconsequential finishing touches to how the scenery is arranged. They also bring out Rosie and Sarah for us. What, though, have they really brought out, and from where?
At first, Blue appears to be bickering with a zany friend, who is played by Zohaib Sajjad. The more that this character lingers on the stage, however, the bigger the confusion that he topples us into. His one prop is a toy fishing rod, which he uses to pull a letter from Sarah out of a mop bucket. Is he merely an oddball? – is the play doing its best to convey that he is genuinely fishing in the sea where Sarah had drowned? – or does he possess a more mystical meaning? Jesus Christ had been an advisor and a fisher of souls but Sajjad’s fisherman remains petulant and marginalised. Blue will forge on without him.
Blue could be alone throughout this story and imagining all of the other characters, even the still-living Rosie. Sarah and Rosie seem to be tulpas, which have walked out of Blue’s own psyche. Or rather their status remains indeterminate. They come with their own signature foodstuffs – Rosie is connected to tea and Sarah to strawberry jelly – perhaps marshalling that link that Marcel Proust had once celebrated between nostalgia and tastes or aromas. The easiest interpretative manoeuvre here is to dismiss these retrieved women as fantasies that are simply playing in Blue’s brain.
One might think that the story does not want to be left alone with its own bleakness. Hence, its elfwork serves as a sweetener. But it is more accurate, I think, to state that the play has no problem with showing the bleakness of human loss. It is elven merely decoratively, in its structure, and if you want you can just look through and beyond its elf patterns.
The play concludes with Sarah unsentimentally leaving the stage, her work done. An amicable breakup has been achieved, to her and Blue’s mutual satisfaction. “Ineffable” thus performs perfectly as a metaphor for the grieving process and it only grows disconcerting if the events on stage are considered to be actually occurring. Where, in this case, is Sarah going?
Tychy 