Heartwood
I'd judge Heartwood to be Curious Directive's most perfectly realised marriage of art and science to date.
It's with hesitation that I announce my personal highlight of the festival, particularly when we're only halfway through, but my goodness it's going to take quite something to trump Curious Directive's Heartwood. I've long admired their productions (and written as much should you care to poke about the internet) be that the swivel-chaired intimacy of Frogman or the extraordinarily ambitious Exoplanet. Heartwood sits comfortably between those two extremes, and I'd judge it their most perfectly realised marriage of art and science to date.
The performance took place in their own venue, a delightful theatre space and bar on the corner of Elm Hill inside - what else for Norwich - the medieval church of St Simon and St Jude. It might surely rank as one of the city's best kept secrets. This allowed them to construct site specific staging that included video montage, a conveyor floor and faux zoom calls. Make no mistake though, for all the company's signature wizardry, it's the performances that really set this production apart. The cast all double up, first appearing as NHS staff, necessarily inoculated against the trauma and tragedy that they must face on a daily basis. They joke about party arrangements, crack some truly awful jokes, and even examine someone from the audience.
This was letting us settle in gently, before Vera Chok's Ava Lin goes for a run, foreshadowing her as yet undetermined, but fatal, accident. I hasten to add I'm giving nothing away, as we know this from the outset. We know too, who will receive the heart for which Ava no longer has a need. James Jip immersed himself entirely in the role of Bodi McGrath, the young man with a failing heart, so much so it took a moment to realise he was the previously wise-cracking Travis Head.
Good though both of these actors were, central to the theme of the play - dare I say its heart - was Sophie Steer's Ellie Wainwright. With a superlative and sensitive portrait of grief she perfectly captured the partner of the deceased. Fragile yet brave, distraught yet stoic, this was a nuanced, yet precisely calibrated performance that elevated the production to something quite special. That said, she was already standing on firm foundations.
With no credited writer I assume this was a devised production, which in inself worth noting. There is such a focused narrative it's frankly astonishing it isn't the product of a singular vision. Full marks are therefore due to director Jack Lowe for such a tightly choreographed production. What we saw was a company embracing technology without letting it overwhelm either the actors, narrative or message. A case in point, in one of several fourth wall breaks, was Nurse Allen's revelation that Asian bodies need Asian hearts, and therefore have to wait longer for a match. In a welcome age of gender and race blind casting, it's nonetheless refeshing that Chok and Jip are playing Asian characters and not just donor and recipient.
This was both a deeply moving experience and an enlightening examination of the tangled reality of organ transplants - not a sentence I ever imagined writing in a review.
