Time Bends is a play that has a lot of ideas about art, literature, and jazz.
There’s a cast of four, but realistically this is a two-hander, featuring as it does an extended conversation between David (Tom McMillan), and Michael (Duccio Baldasseroni).
We open with David, waiting for his wife, at a cinema. The wife, Julie (Izzy Burton), arrives, and there’s a marital conversation that deeply suggests that their marriage bores both of them. There’s some surface level small talk about the kids, and the Air BnB they’re staying in, for this oh so rare weekend away.
David is distracted however. This trip, and this cinema in particular, remind him of a visit to the same cinema some twenty years ago, and a conversation he had with a stranger, which could have changed his life.
As his mind is wandering, his attention is caught by a man, and suddenly, he’s back here, twenty years ago, recalling that conversation. The cast of four is rounded out by the un-named waiter (Sayaka Higashi), who makes the best of the ‘busy work’ they’ve been given to do by director William Oliveira, who has also penned the script.
What follows is a recreation of that conversation. There’s hesitation, there’s banter, there’s diverging opinions about various forms of art and artistic expression. There’s an understanding that, sometimes, two people can meet, randomly, and have a profound effect upon one another.
David and Michael’s conversation is heavy on the literary references, and also heavily influenced by the jazz sound track playing, perhaps a little too loudly at times, throughout the entire performance.
The tracks featured have obviously been carefully chosen, and appear to reflect how one of the characters is feeling at any point during David and Michael’s talk. This is a clever way to add an additional layer of storytelling into the narrative, whilst still managing to adhere to the mantra, “show, don’t tell”.
There’s a level of authenticity to David and Michael’s conversation that is rare to see. Whilst all of the ‘umms’ and ‘ah’s’ that do occur naturally in conversation have been expunged, the meandering nature of their conversation feels very true to life. It also allows our understanding of these two men to develop, slowly, like layers being peeled from an onion.
In the course of their brief conversation, it’s clear that they are both deeply affected. Michael is married, but seemingly not happily – feeling trapped in the drudge of the day to day. This is a motif which reflects David’s obvious concerns in that first initial scene with Julie. There’s a lot of mirroring here, and a lot of yearning. There’s a belief that long-term relationships, especially marriages, can become stale, and stifling.
At times the script is messy. There’s a lot of ideas in here, and some of them do feel like they need more time to breathe. On the night that Brig saw the performance, it did overrun by almost fifteen minutes, but this was the company’s first performance, and we are assuming that the flow may well tighten up as the relatively brief run continues.
The script works well to capture the spirit of ‘twenty years ago’, with small references that help to convey the setting. Everyone smokes, and does so inside. Mobile phones are very basic. Jasper Attlee’s jazz-house project, ‘Berlioz’ is described, correctly, as anachronistic.
Whilst some of the ideas and dialogue do probably need another revision, there is a speech very near the end, delivered by David, that is wrung full with melancholy, and for the loss of what might have been. It’s a beautiful moment in a play which has a lot to say, and which probably needs more time in which to try to say it.
Time Bends continues in Space 1 at The Space on the Mile (usually the Radisson Blu hotel on the Royal Mile) at 22:50, daily, until August 22
Featured Image courtesy: Edinburgh Fringe Society
