Writer: Caridad Svich
Director: Lily McLeish
Blue starts with a splash, followed by the gnomic line: ‘They say it is, but it isn’t.’ It continues as a prose poem, imagining the meditations of a female swimmer. It is set in the English Channel, and director Lily McLeish was drawn to it because she likes an ‘unstageable’ play.
The swimmer is played by acclaimed Swiss actor Irene Jacob, whose richly mature, slightly accented voice, combined with Caridad Svich’s rhythmic language and Julian Starr’s sound design, makes it easy to imagine limbs steadily powering through water. Sometimes her intonation falls on unexpected syllables, and McLeish seems to have encouraged this. Hearing a word pronounced differently can make you re-evaluate it. Remembering a time in hospital the swimmer speaks, with an anxious patient’s forced flippancy, of ‘docs’: at first it sounds like ‘ducks’.
For this woman, swimming is everything. She wonders, jokingly, if a mini stroke is ‘something you do in the kiddie pool’. Svich is intrigued by the idea of water as an ambiguous element that both separates and connects. Oceans know no real political boundaries. The swimmer’s stream of musings flow like water from the personal to the universal, from the immediate past to her whole life so far. She glances at immigration and climate change, and how humanity in general, even after the most traumatic events, drifts back like water into the old channels of preoccupation. She points out that the end of a journey is what some people call ‘a catastrophe’.
This is one of Fizzy Sherbet’s more cerebral podcasts. Svich is a highly distinguished theatre practitioner. Her list of achievements is almost as long as the play. She has to Google herself to find out what she’s written. As the child of immigrants – like everyone on the podcast it turns out – she has the advantage of being bilingual. Tamara von Werthern, co-presenting with Josephine Starte, calls it ‘a super-power’. Svich was ‘that kid reading Shakespeare in fourth grade’, and now writes in both Spanish and English. There is a whole other podcast to made on the topic of mother-tongue versus learned language, which is touched on here. Svich suggests that her Spanish writing is more ‘fiery’ – and then corrects herself for stereotyping – she just changes it to ‘confrontational’. For her every word has weight. She doesn’t like the word ‘conquer’. Yet another podcast could be made exploring whether it’s really possible or even desirable to eradicate words of power and violence from any language.
The guest speaker, Dr Marissa Fragkou, is an expert in precarity, a grand sounding word for an idea which is all too familiar, as she herself acknowledges, to people in the theatre industry. As an academic she uses a lot of abstract nouns, but she is engaging and funny, and also careful with words. She ‘appreciates’ rather than ‘enjoys’ Blue’s reference to ageing. She describes herself as ‘addicted to the sea’, which makes her ideal for this episode. Incidentally, her segment of the podcast is more like 30 minutes, not the 50 minutes stated on the site.
As well as Jacob, we hear Fragkou, who is Greek, and Spanish- Cuban- Argentinian- Croatian Svich (who in fact identifies as American). This London -based podcast reaches round the world like the ocean.
Available here
