The Halyard Theatre · Bexley Wharf · Season Eleven
The Halyard Company presents
by Rosalind Ivory-Ware · directed by Cormac Delaine · after the harbour letters of Elsie Vane
Turn the page
The company performs without understudies. Where a role is doubled, it is noted beneath the line.
The action takes place on the Bexley shore, over eleven days in the autumn of 1911.
Elsie trims a wick that has not been lit in three weeks. A letter arrives from the Board announcing the station's closure, and she reads it aloud to nobody, twice, as though the second reading might soften it.
Thomas comes home after nine years at sea, carrying a chart of a coastline that does not exist. The Harbourmaster wants the lamp sold for salvage; Ottilie wants the chart. Nobody yet wants Thomas.
An inventory is taken of everything the Vanes still own. Corporal Reeve arrives to serve notice and stays for supper. The chart is spread on the table and, for the length of one song, believed.
Interval
Twenty minutes. The bar on the upper foyer serves until the second bell. Please take your glasses back to your seats — we would rather you kept drinking than kept quiet.
The fittings of the station go under the hammer. Elsie bids with money she does not have. The Boy with the Lantern crosses upstage six times and is noticed by no one but the audience.
Ottilie proves the phantom coastline is a copying error repeated across forty years of admiralty charts. Thomas takes this better than expected. Elsie takes it worse.
One night remains on the register. The company gathers, the lamp is lit for ninety seconds, and the harbour is described rather than shown. Curtain.
Rosalind gave me this play as forty-one pages and a photograph of a lamp room with the glass out. She said: it isn't about the sea. Two years later I think she was right, and I think she also knew that saying so would make me spend two years finding out.
We have built almost nothing. There is a table, a stove that works, and a lens that has never been whole. Everything else the actors describe to you, and you build it — which is, I'd argue, the older and better contract between a stage and a room full of strangers.
— Cormac Delaine, September| Date | Time | Access | Seats |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thu 2 Oct | 7.30pm | — | Good |
| Fri 3 Oct | 7.30pm | Captioned | Few left |
| Sat 4 Oct | 2.30pm | Relaxed | Good |
| Sat 4 Oct | 7.30pm | — | Few left |
| Wed 8 Oct | 7.30pm | Audio described | Good |
| Thu 9 Oct | 7.30pm | — | Good |