Depressingly dark but not dull, The Shell Seekers turned out to be a rather thought-provoking production. It is set principally in Gloucestershire, with flashbacks to times spent in Cornwall and Ibiza (of all places!). Penelope, who at the start of the play has just returned home from hospital, spends the entire production battling with her selfish, annoying mess-of-a-family. All three of her children want a piece of their late grandfather’s artwork after discovering that it will fetch a rather tidy sum at auction, and none of them seem to give two hoots about the emotional and sentimental value that their mother holds for the artwork that serves as a clear reminder of her childhood and the close relationship she had with her father. Two of her children, Nancy and Noel, are evidently self-centred and materialistic right from the start of the play, but things become even more depressing when we discover that the one ‘good’ child and the only remaining ‘decent’ character in the bunch, Olivia, is in fact just as wrapped up in herself as the other two.
The play descends further and further into the dark, confronting notions of illness and loss, but most depressingly and rather strangely covered are the characters’ attitudes towards death. The first death we are confronted with is that of Olivia’s boyfriend Cosmo who, despite keeling over and dying at the tender age of 59, doesn’t seem to have left any lasting affect on Olivia at all. Two days after his death she shacks up with an American named Hank. (How apt!) Even more bizarrely, Olivia decides to take responsibility for the late Cosmo’s 18-year-old daughter Antonia, despite quite clearly presenting the audience with the idea that she never really cared for Cosmo in the first place. Her mother Penelope, who we soon discover has had to deal with the loss not only of her father and her late husband, but also with that of her one, true, secret, teenage love, describes the death of a loved one as being like a wave that crashes into you and then rolls over you. Is that it? Surely, in the case of death, there’s more involved than simply waiting for that wave to pass?
In general, this production gets rather too caught up in the different relationships and side-stories that keep appearing with each new character, and could definitely do with being stripped back to its simple – and more pertinent – main storyline. However, the acting was strong, particularly by Judith Daniels in the part of Penelope; and in the final scenes of the production, it cannot be denied that we were all sat on the edges of our seats waiting to hear the verdict of Penelope’s will. The final outcome was of no surprise to any of us, but the predictability of the characters after an hour or so of ‘getting to know them’ made for a satisfying and appropriate finale. The Shell Seekers may not have been a tour de force of the theatrical world, but it certainly provided us with a thrilling insight into the selfish reality of the human race and left us to reflect on the authenticity of our own actions for hours afterwards.
The Shell Seekers was performed at The Carriageworks on 21 October 2011
Hannah Perlin
Comments