Dancing Brick’s production certainly made me feel like I’d been hit in the face by one – in a good way! We are implored not to reveal the awesome twists that Thomas Eccleshare’s taut and wonderful play takes (always tricky in a review) but when they come, the gasps from the audience are certainly akin to the sounds of people being confronted with a significant blow! But first, we have the set-up, straight away highlighting Eccleshare’s ability to create a supremely tense and beautifully expressed narrative. As a company, Dancing Brick (a collaboration between Eccleshare and Valentina Ceschi) have a background in visual and bold performances, and despite this piece being more heavily text-based than previous productions, the company’s Lecoq influences remain clear from the start. We see some incredibly precise body language and a tangiable stress placed on proxemics and lines of force between actors.

We are introduced to the titular Heather,an aspiring author of the soon to be wildly successful children’s book about a young witch Greta, and Harry her prospective publisher. This comes via a series of email exchanges delivered by the actors in a radio play style. To make such a relatively stationery exchange not only engaging but viscerally tense and clearly loaded with subtext is no mean feat, achieved through distinctive use of gesture and space, and made for compulsive viewing. This sense only increased as the piece progressed, and actually the compulsive nature of the human appetite for stories is a key theme interwoven throughout. A very strong picture is created of Heather, brilliantly played by Charlotte Melia as a mild mannered woman on the outside, with something clearly not right on the inside. Harry is also expertly characterised by Ashley Gerlach as a relatively insincere, overly excitable publisher, beside himself with having discovered this new potential cash cow (perhaps the next Harry Potter?).

Through precise characterisation and slick direction and writing, we are led to believe certain things about these characters, making specific judgements and buying in to their worlds entirely. In this sense, Heather prods at the very roots of storytelling, asking if the identities that we construct for ourselves can be ultimately more compelling than any fictional narratives that an author might create. At its heart, the question highlighted is what matter more, the storyteller or the story? Of course, this vast topic has been much explored in linguistic theory around ‘the death of the author’ as a concept. The play expertly applies this to its exploration by relating it to our seemingly unquenchable thirst for public appearances and interviews with authors, asking how much their identity really matters in the telling of their tales.

The production is clearly structured in three parts, and in the middle section, we see such careful constructions blown to smithereens, following the classic storytelling plot-resolution model impeccably and extremely cleverly. At this point, it is difficult to make sense of the fragments and to know what, if anything, to now believe. The denouement comes in an entirely unexpected and highly creative way, heavy with metaphor and symbolism, and asking more questions than it answers. Here we see the play’s complex message communicated with the company’s trademark use of high-energy physical action as the actors multi-role, becoming characters from the Greta novels, each movement loaded with meaning. This is quite delightful in terms of its sheer inventiveness and the cast’s ability to paint wildly imaginative scenes for us. It is also certainly a rather sudden stylistic U-turn, which of course was clearly included to serve a purpose, but perhaps also jarred a little for me. This may be because I found the middle section so absorbing, that I thought that the play had ended there! In all however, this really was an affecting and clever piece which has stayed with me long after it ended, and is particularly exciting for anyone who has an interest in writing and genuinely likes to be surprised multiple times!