Creatives: Alexander Flanagan Wright, Phil Grainger
The production company based in North Yorkshire is appropriately named Wright & Grainger, but the only person we see is Australian actor Megan Drury, from welcoming the audience individually to giving a periodically explosive performance to getting a hefty proportion of the audience to take part in the play – and, incidentally, to howl like wolves. The overall impression is of the sublime confidence on the part of both Drury and Wright who takes responsibility for the script that respectable middle-aged theatre-goers would happily read the F-word aloud. Sheffield is, of course, a university city – whether this would work as well in more strait-laced towns is beyond the scope of this review!
Selene is a meditation on the Moon (though with none of the calm normally associated with meditation) and, at the same time, a portrait of a young girl (who at the age of 12 went to a fancy dress party dressed as the Moon) finding herself via daring adventures and becoming reconciled to the world at the age of 24. Panda’s father died at 24, so the isolated snapshots of her at different ages end at 24. Panda’s mother, Selene, drives a heavy goods vehicle by night and the process by which Panda accepts her real name, Pandia (meaning “all light”) is the main drift of the story.
The script plays on various typical tropes of the Moon: the original Moon landings which Panda replays over and over; the idea of the werewolf which plays with the idea of the twilight hour when you can’t tell a dog from a wolf; the “dark side of the Moon” which is not dark, just not visited. Oddly enough the track that stirs memories is not Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, but Fleetwood Mac. Most of the music – ambient sound, atmospheric, but restrained – is by Grainger.
The stage layout in the Playhouse consists of a bright Moon, with piles of cards and papers arranged in a circle. These Drury picks up in sequence, partly in order to give the audience volunteers their scripts. There is also a microphone, mainly used for Panda to periodically list “All the things I am not”. It’s when these things are discarded that she can emerge as Pandia.
Megan Drury’s manner at the start is somewhat over-ingratiating, but she carries off the evening with considerable aplomb. She sails through the tongue-twisting morass of Greek Moon goddesses and negotiates the wild excesses of the initially rebellious, Moon-obsessed teenager, exploring the dark side of the Moon on her scooter at 16, years later howling at the Moon at a drive-in cinema. At the same time she charms her audience into active participation, at one time asking for no fewer than seven voices, plus a howling dog in the distance (very good, incidentally).
Reviewed on 23 September 2026
The Reviews Hub Star Rating
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7
