Negative Space at New End Theatre

There has been something slightly amiss with my life for awhile. And then, in the shower, it hit me:  I am badly organised.

This realisation was followed by the weighty epiphany that organisation is important and must become present in my affairs. Deep thoughts for one whose hair was coated in a layer of conditioner.

All this is an introduction to the confession that the following is a review of a play that has finished its run. ‘Why publish it all?’ the challenging kid at the front of the class may ask. ‘Well, young Dorothea,’ I may respond, ‘ although the play is gone, the subject lives on and you could do worse than read about it.’

It is a tragic fact of life that, although most of us escape the very worst of it, a few get hit with a thunderbolt of loss from which they never recover.

This is what happened to the three remaining members of a family in Negative Space when 11-year-old Callie goes missing one evening after her flute lesson.

In Tom Hunsinger’s direction of Rachel Sternberg and Jemma Wayne’s script, the five actors – using a small set and dashing around in scene changes to move props around – did a polished job of breathing something like life into this tragedy. April Pearson, best known for playing the nubile Michelle in Skins, was compulsive as Callie – the child turned figment of imagination.

Russell Floyd (of The Bill fame) played Andrew, a father propelled by guilt and lack of imagination to search constantly for his missing child – even ten years on and at the cost of relationships with his wife and remaining child, Samantha. This haunted and unwell character was not made less plausible by his infuriating blindness to the real people around him.

Suzan Sylvestor as Rose, Callie’s mother, was another nails-down-a-blackboard case in that all she could do was daydream about a parallel life in which Callie had never gone missing. Sam (Hannah Tointon) – the younger daughter – is the only family member who could look outside of the past for attachment although dressing up in your missing sister’s clothes whilst coming onto your boyfriend is a shade short of well-adjusted.

Darren (Jamie Harding), the boyfriend, in case you were wondering, was also hung up about Callie and just to really drive the point home, the walls of the stage were made up of washed-out images from Callie’s imagined and real life: the number of her flute teacher’s house, the dress she would have worn to graduation.

Although this play has finished, all the performances were tight and the story distressingly believable. I could have done with a little relief because there is always some chink of light and it doesn’t help to pretend otherwise. But my optimism is no major critique of a play which did what theatre should in enabling us to understand a world that is not ours. Let’s hope we see more where that came from.

Negative Space took place at:

New End Theatre
27 New End
Hampstead
NW3 1JD

Box Office: 0870 033 2733