Shed: Exploded View

Review of Shed: Exploded View at Royal Exchange Theatre.

Partly inspired by Cornelia Parker’s artwork Cold Dark Matter, Phoebe Eclair-Powell’s Bruntwood Prize winning Shed: Exploded View is fragmentary. Like Parker’s dazzling installation, it deconstructs the familiar. Inviting us to view a seemingly random selection of domestic interactions from a different perspective, in a new light.

“We have a nice life I suppose.”

New beginnings pepper the play’s opening sequences – a New Year countdown, a honeymoon, a clean slate of a stage.

Then three different relationships unfold over a thirty-year period. Fractious middle-aged couple Frank and Naomi. Their daughter Abi and her partner Mark, embarking on life together after their college romance. And Lil and Tony, both giving marriage another go – second time for her, third for him.

All seem comfortably off. Stuff happens. Birth, marriages, parties, holidays, illness, worry, caring, arguing. Abi teaching her mother a dance routine from a pop video. A funeral over Zoom. Mark being mugged. A birthday, with a Henry hoover as a surprise present. Pieces of stories that gradually fit together.

Eclair-Powell has written the play in such a way as to allow scenes to be reordered, or even not used, to suit the production.

Here on the Royal Exchange stage, right at the start, there is briefly a shed. Wooden, ordinary, and emitting slivers of light from within.

Although the title may suggest otherwise, no one is going to blow the doors off. Instead, the structure is calmly dismantled piece by piece, and carried away.

There is nothing sensationalist about director Atri Banerjee’s agile framing of the play – it’s deeply thoughtful, almost forensic, in its approach.

As Eclair-Powell’s words flow at cross-purposes, overlap, or echo across generations, they expose patterns of troubling behaviour and highlight subtle acts of coercion.

“I thought he was going to kill her with his eyes.”

Unease, and the threat of violence, seem to simmer beneath the surface.

At certain points, a glass is dropped, and each time it shatters on the ground, reverberating through the floor – like a seismic event.

Hayley Carmichael’s Lil has a quiet, smoky voice. Having escaped one abusive relationship, she is ever watchful, alert for warning signs in other people’s relationships – and like a world-weary Cassandra, feels duty-bound to offer advice. “Run,” she tells other women, “RUN!”

“We weren’t supposed to be this.”

Relationships feel fraught. A child’s casually cruel words to her mother, a dementia sufferer lashing out unthinkingly at their wife, a gambling addiction, an affair.

There is no interval, no let-up. Split into three concentric circles, the stage restlessly revolves, and characters come and go. Scene titles are chalked on the floor, an accumulation of words, a compression of experiences.

Either clipped and concise, or more naturalistically flowing, Eclair-Powell’s dialogue often develops rhythms of its own – percussive, harmonious, or discordant.

“The world keeps hurting and hurting.”

As it becomes knottier, the production gathers momentum. Despite the tricky structure, or perhaps because of its, there is a gripping tension. Not waiting for revelations, we sort of know where things are heading, it’s more a gathering storm.

Performances are understated, stealthy in their impact.

After glimpses of his character Tony’s slide into dementia, Wil Johnson delivers a very moving extended sequence – suddenly finding words to excavate the deepest of feelings while simultaneously fading away.

Naomi and Abi’s bond as mother and daughter feels most vividly portrayed. As Naomi, Lizzy Watts is especially striking – a very believable mix of fragility and steely core. The barely contained emotional charge that runs through the production is joltingly detonated within Watt’s furious impassioned final monologue.

Royal Exchange.

Performances seen on 9 & 15 February 2023.

Shed: Exploded View runs at Royal Exchange from Friday 9 February to Saturday 2 March 2024.

Images by Johan Persson.