Impossible Things Before Breakfast (& Traverse Live)

For last year’s 30-minute “theatre for breakfast” servings, playwrights were briefed to respond to a topical world affair. This time round, those involved – David Eldridge, Simon Stephens, Marina Carr, Linda McLean and Enda Walsh – were invited simply to write about whatever they wanted. And so they’ve done – with mixed results – to be performed as script-in-hand readings each morning at the crack of dawn (in fact 9am, but it feels like dawn on the festival clock).

I was able to see the plays at a more reasonable evening hour, thanks to the Traverse Live initiative, which saw all five performed back-to-back and, taking a leaf out of the NT Live book, simultaneously broadcast to cinemas across the UK (which I’ll blog about separately). Sadly, the later time didn’t prevent me from having continually to wipe the sleep from my eyes as the tedium of some of the material combined with the heat in the room worked me into a stupor.

The most successful of the five playlets is Simon Stephens’ T5 monologue, in which a woman precariously perched on a chair high above the room, doesn’t “know how to get down” and return to normality after witnessing a violent crime. Enda Walsh’s My Friend Duplicity is also intriguing and replete with lyrical Irish beauty (not to mention some wonderful one-liners about national identity – “You can throw all manner of shit at the Irish and we’ll turn it into art”).

Of the others, David Eldridge’s All Is Vanity starts promisingly in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? fashion but veers to a ludicrous demise; Quartet must surely have been written by a delusional middle-aged man (like the protagonist who has to beat off the three-fold attentions of his wife, mistress and young lover) rather than Marina Carr; and Linda McLean’s This Is Water is a verbatim drama without any drama at all, only banal and largely inarticulate mutterings about uncertainty.

If you attend in the morning, breakfast is included in the price, which means you’re guaranteed of some fulfilment, whichever pot-luck play you get.