Writer: Hannah Petch
Director: Caron Kehoe
Sound behaves differently underwater. Fresh out of a toxic relationship, Leah finds refuge beneath the waves in her home town of Swansea after finding university life in London too overwhelming.
In Hannah Petch’s Water Baby, Marina Johnson’s solo turn as Leah is mainly delivered in the form of a monologue to her ex, a housemate in their student flat, recapping their relationship from becoming fast friends in freshers’ week to entering into a relationship.
That all is not well, and that the ex may have been the cause of, rather than a relief to, Leah’s anxiety emerges gradually from Petch’s script. We also see glimpses of Leah at her most natural – wrily funny, pleasant company if never quite the life and soul – in such ways that the gradual creep of anxiety feels natural. Johnson is on great form in these moments; although occasionally performing script-in-hand, Leah is never less than fully alive, present and adept at holding court.
Because we entirely see the relationship from Leah’s point of view, the ways in which her ex gaslights her are shrouded in the same fog of doubt and anxiety which Leah herself feels. When the relationship turns to an instance of sexual abuse – sensitively, if distressingly, described by Johnson – Petch captures the conflicting emotions within. This is something supremely horrible, both physically and emotionally devastating: but it also tells Leah that she has not been going mad, and her suspicions about her ex are confirmed.
Less successful is the withholding of information about her ex until the last moments of the play. Until then, ambiguous hints about her ex’s identity are all that we hear. In order to keep such details hidden, we lose much of a sense of what attracted Leah and her ex to each other, which arguably then means we are not let into what Leah sees as value in their relationship.
It may be that the intent is to focus instead on Leah’s experience and to suggest that her story of being stuck in a coercive relationship is an all too universal one. But when a quest for universality gets in the way of this one story being told to its best extent, then it means the true power of Petch’s otherwise devastating story is muted, lost beneath the waves.
Reviewed on 6 March 2024
