Writer: Danielle James
Director: Hannah Calascione
With secrets scrawled on walls, affectionate bickering inside a friendly flat-share suddenly becomes a whirl through time as a friendship faces the impenetrable complexities of illness, mortality and grief. Knives and Forks from Band of Sisters Theatre is an eerie and mostly moving homage to female friendship, and love through illness.
Iris and Thalia (Ianthe Bathurst and Thea Mayeux) are flatmates who bicker, laugh and love each other fiercely. This familial love is tested, however, as Iris’ health declines, sending them both into a dangerous spiral. Time itself becomes flexible as secrets, illness and arguments manifest in an electric breakdown.
Director Hannah Calascione builds an enthralling energy with snappy scenes interspersed throughout a four-year period across the pair’s cohabiting and Iris’ illness. India Walton and Chien-Hui Yen create a pastiche of repetitive and erratic movement alongside the pair, onstage representatives of the battling psyches of Iris and Thalia. They scrawl dates and paintings on the back of the stage, aligning the audience with the timeline of the plot and eventually creating a physical representation of the friendship hurtling toward an inevitable end.
Knives and Forks is undeniably engaging but fails to find the full picture of Iris and Thalia’s relationship. Danielle James’ text and the rapid episodic scenes do well to give the production pace and highlight the feverish and dysfunctional reality of friendship. Equally Bathurst and Mayeux both have a notable onstage presence and move within James’ dialogue freely. But the text struggles to paint a true picture of the friends, not helped by seemingly unnecessary references to time jumps. However good the performances are individually, a chemistry that meets the intensity of the play is only beginning to be found. It fundamentally interrupts the audience’s relationship to the characters and allows them to tune out.
Equally, although a lot of Caterina Danzico’s movement choices are well placed and, occasionally, powerful, they’re too easy to disregard whilst trying to simply manage the timeline of the actual plot and delve deeper into the relationship presented. Without that emotional connection to Iris and Thalia, and between them, the dramatic punch of the production is undermined.
A powerful theatrical effort, Knives and Forks has all the workings of a powerful piece of theatre. Delving further is the only next step for this production to find its place in audiences’ minds.
Runs until 21 July 2024
Bitesize Festival runs until 28 July 2024
The Reviews Hub Score
Eerie homage to female friendship
