Writer and Director: Beau Hopkins
At the heart of Contemporary Ritual Theatre’s SALT is a mother and son duo in a 1770s fishing community. Emily Outred’s Widow Pruttock is concerned about her son, Man Billy (Mylo McDonald), especially his violent nature and his growing obsession with killing the fisherman rumoured to have murdered his own father. Desperate to save her son from himself, she pleads with local fishing boats not to hire him. As Billy grows into adulthood, he falls in with the mysterious, shamanistic Sheldis (Bess Roche), who begins to architect her own plan.
Beau Hopkins’s play often feels more like a piece of physical dance with dialogue. His characters frequently engage in ritualistic choreography, break into folk songs throughout, and speak in a mannered, artificial phrasing that feels out of kilter with the roles they are really playing. Allied with some accent work that never quite settles on a consistent presentation – although set in north Norfolk, the vocals seem to migrate all over the British Isles – this is a play that is determinedly impressionistic rather than striving for realism.
Playing in the round, and with various baskets, buckets and wickerwork dispersed at the audience’s feet, there is a great sense of proximity to the cast. That helps to form a connection in ways that the play’s structure itself battles against. Act I introduces the Pruttocks, to be sure, as well as some other members of the fishing community (all multi-roled by the cast), but is more concerned with Sheldis’s rituals of song and dance than progressing anything to do with plot.
Such reservations are mitigated by Roche’s charismatic performance. Sheldis is a charismatic figure who one can quite believe is able to bewitch Man Billy, and whose performance shines through the arch dialogue and mannered movement. McDonald and Outred never find themselves able to emerge in quite the same way.
That said, Act II starts to deliver on the play’s narrative drive. Recurrent use of knives, whether used for gutting fish or for the temptation to gut humans, hints at the show’s macabre undertones. There are lighter moments, too, especially when Outred and Roche take on the guise of a couple of fishwives, mired in gossip and superstition.
But it is when the show returns to the twisted relationship between Billy and his mother that the play is both darker and more cohesive. Widow Pruddock’s need to control and subdue her son sees her take to extreme, incestuous measures, coupling violence and desire with something far more primal. There is a brutality common to all three of the central characters that, while unpleasant, makes SALT come alive when in play. Such moments are certainly more interesting than its frequent meanders away from the central plot.
There is the remaining feeling that, inside a play with a running time in excess of two hours, there is a decent hour’s worth of drama struggling to break free. As Man Billy’s mother does to him, SALT seems determined to contain the play, fearful of what may happen should its true heart be unleashed.
Runs until 15 March 2026
