I’m always curious to see what kind of show receives funding. Will it be original, accessible, have heart, warmth, humour, intelligence? I’m happy to say that One Way Mirror, the recipient of the Brighton Fringe Trapeze Media Bursary 2024 has all of these and more.
This quirky storytelling theatre piece, made with the support of Theatre Royal Stratford East and Interactive Soup, communicates the isolation and separated-yet-connected nature of the recent lockdown period within an interlacing of stories, painting a tender community landscape. It asks what makes a home, offers compassionate paranoia tinging hypochondria, and plays with the historical supernatural. It’s a hug in theatre form.
The staging is minimum with a sheet of tinted perspex hung in the centre as the titular one way mirror, with a chair behind it. Our storyteller Jonathan sits behind here… and then steps out of the enclosed rectangle… and then back… disconnecting and connecting with us, as he tells his tales of living as the custodial tenant in a former solicitors’ office with a one way mirror looking out onto the street. His choice is to be “David Attenborough not Stacey Dooley” in his hands-off study of the people. And we get ours intermittently as we are offered three opportunities to vote to swerve the tale into interaction on his part, resulting in something of a choose your own adventure style openness.
All of the audience interaction is with warmth, consent and tenderness, gently showcasing the small wonders in individuality. The bespoke soundtrack is a reassuring suburban stroll, sunshine and dustbins clanging, a large reassuring hand in our smaller ones as we travel into emotionally choppy waters. As Jonathan’s own tale, away from the mirror observations, drifts to the medical and moves us move from passive witnesses to compassionate inactivity.
One Way Mirror is a warm, sensitive reminder of choice, taken from a time when we felt we had very little. And of small wonders, in a period of casual brutalities. A worthy (and necessary) winner of this year’s bursary indeed.
The Actors
