Writer: Bailey Edwards
Director: Mia Hull
In the very barest playing space conceivable, a tangle of cables and a dog’s travel crate sit on the floor. The audience enters the room, takes their seats, and waits. After a moment, orange peels (maybe grapefruit peels, it’s hard to tell) are thrown out of the crate, followed by the arms and head and finally the entirety of the storyteller, Echo (played by the writer Bailey Edwards).
He riffs on his twin sister ( Annalisa Plumb), his failed relationships, and his complex love–hate relationship with dogs. He is funny and physically extraordinary and slightly desperate, but above all, he is weird. The weird gets weirder as he expounds on grapefruit (they were grapefruit peels, it turns out) and the fruit tree in the garden of their family home. He extracts his sister from the dog crate – there are a lot of actors in a dog crate, for an impressively long time – and they converse through microphones, filling in family details, alluding to the events that have led him to his dog house domicile.
The story is interleaved with Greek myth, the story of Echo and Narcissus, the man who falls in love with himself, the woman cursed to never initiate speech, only to repeat it. The narrator identifies with the woman Echo, though he behaves more like the man. It’s difficult.
Bailey Edwards and Annalisa Plumb are engaging and energetic; their stories are intriguing, but what anything signifies is harder to pin down. It’s a ride, it’s entertaining, it’s very hard to know what it all actually amounts to, but it’s fun trying to work it out. Bailey Edwards writes compellingly, acts engagingly, entertains, and baffles. Exploring the back streets of Haggerston for an hour in his company is worth the effort, and what it all means may become clear after some pondering. But whatever it is, grapefruit figure large.
Runs until 8 November 2025
