Writer: Léona McClay
Directors: Sarah Wong and Ellie McCoy
Léona McClay’s dystopian play arrives like a shock to the system. Five young women, chosen for their intellectual prowess, live in a unit where time has been banned and where memory no longer exists. Each day runs the same. And yet Bearable Sequence is full of surprises, right down to its final scene.
Seemingly inspired by The Handmaid’s Tale dystopian future, there are also flashes of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None when one woman (Beatriz Do Ó’s Be) disappears from the unit in the middle of the night. However, McClay constantly resists expectations and is careful never to give away too much information, keeping the audience guessing for the whole of the 90-minute running time. Tension also comes from Beckett Gray’s inventive lighting design and from Bonnie Diver’s ominous music, both creating a dark and chilling world. It’s so refreshing to see a play that refuses to squander its atmosphere for laughs.
McClay also performs the role of the main protagonist Ro, who challenges the tenets of her “education” provided by the sinister Ma (Katy Slater). Ro questions the strict rigmarole of maths, where numbers must form a pattern and of literature, where stories should reveal moral lessons. She sees other sequences and, in fourth wall-breaking scenes, challenges the audience not to be complacent about the stories it is told.
Her friend Em (Gigi Downey) is punished for daring to believe that gender is not related to biology – an issue even more relevant since the recent ruling by the UK Supreme Court that trans women are not women. Must she, too, be removed from the programme? Alhena Al-Ali Douglas’s Su is brainwashed into duplicity, while new recruit Fi (Lydia Whitehead) is full of good intentions, refusing to forget the women who have disappeared.
Drinking grey gunk as rehydration and eating bags of brown rice that they begin to suspect is full of chemicals to erase their memories, the women have no idea what their purpose is within – and without – the unit. However, Su remembers more than she lets on, while Ro is haunted by a pop melody she thought her mother once sang to her. The girls’ hesitant rendition of My Girl is one of the few times that light enters Bearable Sequence’s bleak aesthetic.
Never laying it on too thick, McClay’s play works, of course, as a metaphor for how women are treated in the current age. Ro’s anguished plea for the audience to act is reminiscent of Effie’s final, powerful speech in Gary Owen’s Iphigenia in Splott, where she calls out the Government for its swingeing austerity cuts. McClay’s targets are broader and less tangible, but still as frightening. Her play is brave and vital and deserves a longer run.
Runs until 16 May 2024
