Theatre review: Sea Creatures

One of the more baffling and dreamlike plays I've seen in a while, Cordelia Lynn's Sea Creatures seems to have a solid enough setting: A holiday home on an unnamed part of the British coast, where a noted academic brings her family every summer. Shirley (Geraldine Alexander) was the youngest woman ever to be awarded a professorship at her university, but she hasn't published anything for a decade and has become vague and distracted - she's sometimes described as not being able to tell the difference between animate and inanimate objects. Her partner Sarah (Thusitha Jayasundera) is an artist; no matter what the subject of her art is meant to be, she always ends up with a painting of a lobster. Shirley's eldest daughter George (Pearl Chanda) is heavily pregnant but not happy about it, and responds angrily to anyone who points it out, while youngest daughter Toni (Grace Saif) is a childlike 22-year-old.

Middle child Robin is also due to arrive for the summer with her boyfriend, but Mark (Tom Mothersdale) arrives alone. Robin has disappeared, and Mark hopes she'll turn up here.

It sounds as if Robin disappearing isn't an entirely unusual occurrence, but while Mark is willing to sit it out - he also hopes Shirley will look over his PhD thesis while he's there - there seems to be a general feeling that this time around Robin's gone for good. And for the most part that's the play: Mark stays at the cottage through the summer, not entirely welcome or fitting in, but determined to make himself useful, mostly by cooking - a skill Toni is very resistant to being taught.

Mark as the male interloper in a house full of women doesn't quite operate on the same surreal level as them, which isn't to say he doesn't have his own oddities - we sometimes see scenes slip into fantasy as he imagines a violent or fantastical response to what's going on.

There are a couple of moments where the play's underlying theme of mythical sea creatures is made explicit: Fred the Fisherman (Tony Turner) visits a couple of times to tell strange, sad fairytales about mermaids and disappearances; an old woman (June Watson) breaks into the house to deliver a monologue to Mark about how she's a selkie who's lost her seal skin and can't return to the sea. Is the missing Robin perhaps a mermaid or selkie who's found her way back and will never be seen again?

James Macdonald's production embraces the mix of banal summer holiday time-wasting and the surreal - the family play charades, but Shirley thinks the answer to everything is "hand gestures" (it is at least acknowledged at one point that she may have early-onset dementia.) Jack Knowles' lighting and Max Pappenheim's sound conjure up apocalyptic storms and tidal waves of light. And in the most bizarre moment, two lobsters scuttle across Zoë Hurwitz' set. At two hours with a few slow lulls, the show could certainly be snappier, but I can't say I didn't enjoy its weird lyrical meandering and pathologically ambiguous characters. Just don't ask me what any of it means.

Sea Creatures by Cordelia Lynn is booking until the 29th of April at Hampstead Theatre Downstairs.

Running time: 2 hours straight through.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.