Writer and Director: Poppy Winter
Part of the Women’s Writers Festival at the Etcetera Theatre, Poppy Winter’s The Hole presents a woman in the middle of an existential crisis, having escaped her suburban and fairly standard life to hide out in the woods. A complicated and meandering piece, advertised as one hour but running closer to 90-minutes, The Hole takes the audience into several aspects of the woman’s life in the past and present while also exploring God, nature, the blight of human existence on the earth and a variety of other story points and themes that might be better served in four or five different plays.
As writer-director-performer, Winter has created a strong opening premise, a young woman who has thrown over the trappings of modern life to live a calming existence with nothing but an (imaginary) dog for company. And there are lots of potential directions that Winter could take from this moment, exploring the pressures of contemporary city life and the anxiety it creates, the disconnection between human ‘progress’ and the natural rhythms of the wood or even a completely absurdist piece in which engages the audience with a protagonist whose choice to live in a hole becomes the point rather than an incidental detail.
The show, in some ways, chooses all of these ideas but without serving any of them. It is vastly overwritten and enormously digressive, placing the central character in the role of prophet of something that is never explained and taking the audience through impenetrable monologues about light flowing between us all, transcending individualism, not helped by clunky lines like “every single one of us writing the story of the future.” There is a link to the final extended section as the woman assumes the role of Mother Earth, chastising the viewer for all the ways humanity is blindly failing and bumbling through the generations, but the overall purpose of The Hole slips away as the tone becomes more abstract.
The strongest element here is the story of the woman who may be suffering from post-partum depression following a traumatic, premature birth and the ways that this may be bound up with the loss of her father as well as a frosty relationship with her own mother. How these unfolding circumstances lead to her being in the middle of the woods is well managed and, ultimately, convincing, but the segue into questioning the existence of God or the universe and morphing into the chastising earth mother loses that much stronger thread that Winter has created.
It is well performed in a simple circle, evocative of all of the places that the story takes us and Winter’s confidence precipitates a stillness in the delivery which is very engaging. Yet the connection between the different phases of The Hole is not translating to the audience as too many ideas and too many words compete, meaning the tone, which is sometimes casual and warm and at others attempting something more profound, feels confused and scattered.
Runs until 17 March 2026
