Writer: Luke Stapleton
Director: Jamie Biddle
Stumbling home from a night out, a man is found left for dead on the side of the road. Easy to ignore, he’s left to slowly bleed out, no one bothering to stop and check if he’s even still breathing. But someone does stop, someone who in time slowly builds up a friendship with the injured old man known as Keith, even if most of the time he’s being mistaken for multiple people in Keith’s past. Both lost, both tortured by their history and both feeling the emptiness that drowns them in their little coastal town – their lives parallel each other in ways they didn’t initially realise, which could ultimately lead to their downfall.
Talented actor Conor Lowson leads this one-man monologue through a story of regret, friendship and redemption. His character is never named, lost in anonymity as well as in life. He has found a kindred soul in Keith, who is never shown, but is brought to life by writer Luke Stapleton’s strong descriptive skills. Jumping from the present to incidents in the past and onto snippets of the future, the narrative timeline is robust and well structured, but with minimal direction by Jamie Biddle on the empty stage, it instead dilutes the snippets of excitement, relying on audience imagination and concentration rather than a more constructed performance.
What initially begins as an engaging story with intriguing characters, unfortunately starts to lose momentum and slowly turns into what feels like a character driven ramble, as though the audience are stuck at a pub table with that drunken stranger that never quite knows when to finish their monotonous tale. Lowson is absolutely fantastic as the show’s narrator and cannot be faulted – a show like this needs a charismatic actor to carry the show such as himself, full of energy and compelling the audience to want to know more. But even with Lowson’s strong acting abilities and charming nature, the show still struggles to get past the long, drawn-out story against the stripped bare production.
Playing as part of Encompass Production’s Homecoming Festival, Scab has the foundations of an engaging narrative, but it needs more to really ignite the story. Such an in-depth script shouldn’t be a lengthy monologue that is talked at to the audience; it should be as fleshed out and as built up as the story itself to fully match the energy from the writing and acting.
Runs until 30 April 2022
