The Almond And The Seahorse

SYNOPSIS

For Gwennan, it’s always 1985. The face in the mirror is unfamiliar and there’s a strange man at the door claiming to be her husband. Joe’s past is coming undone and his partner, Sarah, fears she will be forgotten. What happens when you’re ambushed by time – your memories deleting, relationships erasing?

The play focuses on those who have survived Traumatic Brain Injury, informed by a Disability perspective.

"Unmissable drama ... Throughout Kaite O’Reilly’s tremendous new play ... extraordinary scenarios are tenderly drawn and powerfully realised in Phillip Zarrilli's beautifully judged production." 5 stars ***** (The Guardian, 2008)

“This is a powerful drama, beautifully written…Compelling and emotionally charged ... Bold and effecting ...” (British Theatre Guide, 2008)

“Kaite O’Reilly’s powerful new play ... Superb ... impressively researched ... [with] graveyard humour, poetic flights of fancy ...” (The Stage, 2008)

“Dense and multi-layered, ...Like…[Rothko or Satie]… Kaite O’Reilly has complete mastery over a territory that is distinctively her own…. What marks out Kaite O’Reilly’s writing is the skill with which she sets up deep echoes and resonances so that her play vaults beyond its subject...” (Theatre Wales, 2008)

“... this intelligent work ... flashes of brilliance. A fascinating work, totally engaging ...” (Western Mail, 2008)

First Production
The Almond and The Seahorse premiered at Sherman, Cardiff,
29th February 2008, launching the English language productions of Sherman Cymru, then toured nationally.

Director: Phillip Zarrilli
Writer: Kaite O’Reilly
Set & costume design: Fiona Watt
Lighting designer: Ace McCarron
Cast: Nia Gwynne, Celyn Jones, Olwen Rees, Ian Saynor, Mojisola Adebayo

The script is included in Kaite's selected 'Atypical Plays for Atypical Actors' , published by Oberon https://www.oberonbooks.com/atypical-plays.html

Single script texts, published by Script Cymru, are available at www.gwales.com or www.amazon.co.uk or from Sherman Cymru.

REVIEWS IN FULL

The Guardian
Elisabeth Mahoney
March 8, 2008

Unmissable drama
5 stars *****

"Throughout Kaite O'Reilly's tremendous new play about the emotional aftermath of serious head injury, pockets of the gloomy set are lit in isolation. It becomes clear, as the drama reveals two couples living with this bewildering scenario, that it is intended as a reflection of how only parts of a brain might work after a devastating blow or illness, and how aspects of the person you were, or knew, can be snuffed out.

The dramatic potential of a character living with compromised, diminishing memory is obvious, but O'Reilly's focus is on the impact on their loved ones and the quiet, slow, private loss they endure. Gwennan, now in her 50s, remembers only her life before a car crash in her 20s, when she was newly married, pregnant and full of hope. Each morning, she screams when she sees her older self, and is repulsed by husband Tom, who sounds like the young man she remembers but looks all wrong. Joe has impaired short-term memory and his longer-term recollections, which give him at least some connection with his wife Sarah, are dwindling.

These extraordinary scenarios are tenderly drawn and powerfully realised in Phillip Zarrilli's beautifully judged production. Fiona Watt's set shows past, present and future colliding - as it does for the couples - and the performances are uniformly affecting. The couples' lives alter irrevocably as we watch, and this is not a play with any sunny, easy resolution.

"That is what makes our lives: memory," says Sarah. This unmissable drama - which promises much for the future of new writing company Sherman Cymru - confronts the uncomfortable reality of what happens to life, and even the most patient love, without it."

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British Theatre Guide
Allison Vale
March 20, 2008

Compelling and emotionally charged

The Sherman Cymru launches its first season with a bold and affecting new production by playwright Kaite O'Reilly. The Almond and the Seahorse is a compelling and emotionally charged look at the impact of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) on sufferers and their relatives.
O' Reilly passionately believes in the need to stage issues of disability in mainstream theatre. Her award-winning work with the disabled-led theatre company, Graeae, also stands testimony to this passion. But this play goes far beyond simply providing a platform for the playwright's political agenda: this is a powerful drama, beautifully written, which says as much about the universal themes of life, love, death and devotion as it does about disability.
Tom and Gwennan have been married for over twenty years, but a car accident left Gwennan 'frozen' at the age of twenty-nine. Tom (Ian Saynor) is an almost broken man, turned inside out by the heart-ache of living with the woman he loves, who can no longer recognise him. Olwen Rees as Gwennan has a disconnected, other-worldly quality; in the midst of the fog that has descended on her, there are moments where Rees is painfully lucid, with an agonising self-awareness.
Sarah (Nia Gwynne) and Joe (Celyn Jones) are twenty years younger than Tom and Gwennan. Following surgery to remove a brain tumour, Joe was left with significant short term memory loss, able to engage in articulate conversation but unaware of his condition. As Sarah puts it, "The lights are on but someone else is home".
Celyn Jones brings humour to the tragedy of his situation. Nia Gwynne stands firm against the mounting pressures of life with the husband she loves; or rather without the husband she loves.
"You're not bitter and twisted and cynical, dark in the soul in the way you used to be. And I loved that. It wasn't always comfortable, but I knew I was alive."
Mojisola Adebayo plays Dr Farmer, a neuropsychologist who, it emerges, has demons of her own which have driven her to devote her life to TBI. Adebayo gives a complex performance as a well-meaning physician, unable to empathise with the relatives of her patients, scarred by her experience of her father's memory loss.
Phillip Zarilli's insightful direction ensures that the performances have absolute authenticity. But the real triumph of this play is that O' Reilly isn't only concerned with the lives of the carers, and then with disabled caricatures. All of her characters are complex, isolated and endearing individuals; two of them happen also to be disabled. There is no room for tokenism.
"The Almond and the Seahorse" runs at the Sherman Cymru until March 15th, then tours to Brecon, Mold, Aberystwyth, and the Contact Theatre, Manchester

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The Stage
Jon Holliday
March 20, 2008

Superb ensemble work

The devastating effects brain injury can have on survivors and their loved ones are graphically rammed home in Kaite O’Reilly’s powerful new play. It makes for grim, disturbing, even harrowing viewing, as partners strive to cope with those so traumatised, whose loss of memory changes their personalities, isolating them, making them all but strangers.

Impressively researched, documentary in style, with the all too human heartaches exposed, this gritty, well-paced staging by Phillip Zarrilli needs no added theatricality to get across the sheer hurt and despair experienced.

Since then her husband carer (Ian Saynor) cannot break into her world of youthful recall where she no longer recognises anyone, not even her older self in the mirror. The neuropsychologist (Mojisola Adebayo) at the Respite centre the four attended does what she can to explain and encourage, though anything approaching recovery to normality is not on the agenda. Graveyard humour, poetic flights of fancy, intimate confessions, all help relieve the pervading atmosphere of frustration and desperation. The contrasts of mood and pace in the confrontations are beautifully handled, the sensitive ensemble work is quite superb. The unintrusive soundscape by Catherine Clissold-Jones contributes much, though the captions flagged up prove an unnecessary distraction. The effective set and costumes are designed by Fiona Watt. Lighting is by Ace McCarron.
The tantalising title refers to the shapes of those sections of the brain responsible for memory and personality traits.

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Western Mail
Mike Smith
March 9, 2008

The Almond and the Seahorse

Copies of Kaite O’Reilly’s play are available for sale at Sherman Cymru and I highly recommend buying a copy.

After watching this intelligent work I went to supper with my partner and in the course of the meal found myself flicking through the pages and quoting at least three passages from the play in salient parts of the conversation.

The play is about two couples whose lives are frankly destroyed because of one half of each couple having brain damage and losing their parts of their memory.

But it is full of other observations on the nature of life, of relationships, of change, of aging which transcend the specific situation our characters are forced into because of a car accident and through a brain tumour.

It is also worth having the script because of one of the downsides of the play which is the fact that it is a slightly difficult balance of realistic dialogue and interactions with rather artificial, poetic discourses, references and analogies that are slightly too clever for spontaneous everyday conversations. They read better on the page than they sound when supposedly part of a spontaneous conversation.

There is also a little lack of subtlety. Yes, there is of course irony in the character whose partner is slipping further and further into the past as his memory is decaying being an archeologist. But we don’t really need to be told it is ironic and then explain the irony.

Similarly the reflection on the nature of get well tokens sent to ill people ranging from Indian gods to beanie dolls is a little over explained.

But this is a reflection on the depth of the content of the play which also has flashes of brilliance. The phone conversation between a baffled Joe, played by Celyn Jones, is called by a lady in India who he can’t remember knowing and who asks him about his electricity supplier is brilliant. That whole scene, when he keeps taking cigarettes out of a packet having instantly forgotten he just did the same thing, was superbly crafted.

The relation between Gwennan , played by Olwen Rees, and Tom, played by Ian Saynor , was extremely, moving. Gwennan has lost all memory since a car crash when she was a young woman and every morning is Groundhog Day when she looks in the mirror and is freaked out by the 50 year old woman looking back at her. She does not know who the similarly greying man her husband has become who keeps trying to talk to her.

In desperation Tom, who has been her carer for 20 years, encounters Joe’s wife Sarah, played by Nia Gwynne , both being in need of comfort and some respite in each others company.

All the way through we have the neuropsychologist Dr Ife Falmer played by Mojisola Adebayo who discusses the illnesses, the behaviour of the patients, and tries to reach out and help the partners.

Two narrative devices are adopted for the doctor with varying success. One is the doctor talking to the audience on the nature of memory, its fragility etc and the other is, Sex in the City style, typing observations into her laptop with key words being illuminated across the set. Both interesting if at times a little unsubtle when it turns out the good doctor has issues herself with memory loss in the family.

The use of mobile phone calls and recorded messages work extremely effectively as dramatic devices but also to touch on the nature of communication, storing memory in the form of audio messages, time shifts and perceptions.

In all a fascinating work, totally engaging and a text worth delving into again and again. The cast is faultless, impeccable performances, completely sympathetically given and true.

The Almond and The Seahorse are, by the way, parts of the brain associated with memory.

Sherman Cymru until March 15 then touring to Theatr Brecheiniog, Brecon, April 2; Clwyd Theatr Cymru, Mold, April 4, 5; Aberystwyth Arts Centre, April 8 and Contact Theatre, Manchester, April 11 and 12.

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Theatre Wales
Michael Kelligan
March 9, 2008

A gritty, absorbing play

Award winning, Birmingham-Irish, Wales-based writer Kaite O’Reilly has a passionate up-beat belief in human nature and its ability to endure. More than that she has a marvellous and subtle skill to express this feeling through her writing with such sensitive beauty and delicate understanding that we are almost overwhelmed by the poetry in her words as she unveils, once again, a world of damaged people fighting to find some kind of reality in their existence.

The Almond and the Seahorse are colloquial terms for the parts of the brain responsible for memory, emotion and personality traits. Both Gwennan and Joe have suffered Traumatic Brain Injury. All Gwennan’s recent memories have been obliterated. She remains, to herself, an attractive young twenty year old cello player, her husband Tom she sees looking old and unattractive, she has cut him out of her life. No one should let the misfortune in the play deter them. The clarity in the writing and the wonderful way in which the actors are able to enter so completely into their characters is what real theatre is all about.

Ian Saynor lets us know that Tom was once a strong character, he excels in the way he lets us observe all that strength crumbling away from him, “It’s a kind of dying”. Olwen Rees, as his wife lets us peer into her damaged mind and fills the air with a sort of awkward nostalgia. She paints a picture of her young life and beguiles us with stories as she lapses into her native Welsh Language.

In some ways Joe’s partner, Sarah seems to be getting a better deal. Joe has a reduced short term memory and can no longer gather any new memories. There are moments when he can be quite lucid, their love for each other shows but moments are not a life time. Celyn Jones gives a masterly and captivating performance. The precision he brings to a very difficult scene where, alone on the stage he tries to control his cigarettes, several mobile phones, his pills, a clock, as well as Rita on the home phone trying to sell him cheap electricity is quite remarkable.

Nia Gwynne, as Sarah perfectly captures the complex emotions of caring, of frustration and love, at one point she yearns to bear his children. Nevertheless there is no hint of sentimentality in this gritty, absorbing play. There is a fifth character, a thrusting neurophysiologist who has care of Gwennan and Joe, she keeps her distance and finds it difficult to properly empathise with Tom and Sarah. This is a very detailed and keenly observed study from Mojisola Adebayo.

Director Phillip Zarrilli at times brings a frustrating slow pace to the storytelling, in doing this he cleverly puts us all into the position of the struggling partners trying to cope not with their victims but with their survivors.
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Disability Arts Online
March 2008

'The Almond and the Seahorse' explores the relationships between survivors of traumatic brain injury and their loved ones. This is not a play about a condition but rather a thought-provoking drama about people’s lives that have been changed forever by something that could happen to anyone. Gwennan (Olwen Rees) is involved in a car crash and no longer recognises herself or her husband Tom (Ian Saynor). Joe (Celyn Jones) has survived the removal of a brain tumour but now has memory loss. Dr Farmer (Mojisola Adebayo) gives us the medical facts about Joe and Gwennan’s injuries but it is their beautifully drawn characters that makes this play so engaging. A strength of O’Reilly’s writing is her ability to create complete, rounded, in depth characters that an audience can care about.

The play also studies the concept of time and what it means to someone with memory loss and their families. There are some golden moments when Sarah (Nia Gwynne) talks about the impossibility of having a future when living with someone so firmly stuck in the present. This moving and witty play will ring true to anyone who has experienced the life changing effects of memory loss; the humour as well as the bereavement of losing someone you are still having a relationship with.

Phillip Zarrilli’s uncomplicated, considerate direction, brings the writing to life. It would be easy to turn such a subject into a melodrama but this production is totally honest. Fiona Watt’s simple but effective set assisted in the flow of the piece. Dr Farmer’s notes are projected onto the set which is unsettling as well as striking and along with the lighting helps to emphasise the fragments and shadows of the injured brain.

All five actors gave strong, convincing performances. This is not an easy play but each performer found a very definite pace to keep the audience captivated. Joe and Sarah’s story is perhaps the easiest to engage with, largely due to Celyn Jones who managed to portray the many faces of Joe with charm and an extraordinary depth. A highlight for me was Joe trying to make sense of the world of notebooks and alarms his wife had created for him to help him get through the day.

There will be many debates as to where this work sits in the world of Disability Arts. But one thing is for sure, this brilliant play has achieved in bringing Disability Arts into a mainstream arena. The Almond and The Seahorse should be seen by many. If you don’t live near Cardiff or Manchester treat yourself to a weekend by the sea and experience this striking piece of theatre in Aberystwyth – it will be worth the trip.

Performance Dates Sherman, Cardiff until March 15 Theatr Brycheiniog, Brecon - 2 April Clwyd Theatr, Mold - 4-5 April Aberystwyth Arts Centre - 8 April Contact Theatre, Manchester - 11-12 April

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Theatre Wales website
Victor Hallett
April 17, 2008

Perfectly paced and nuanced

As Dr Falmer explains, musical memory is often retained when other memory functions are lost or fractured. So it’s not too surprising that Kaite O’Reilly’s powerful and moving play has much in common with chamber music.

Here are voices and words forming patterns, now together, now far apart, now in harmony, now in discord. Sometimes the main theme is carried by one voice, sometimes by more, sometimes by unexpected combinations. Forming the spine of the piece is Dr Falmer herself, acting like the ground bass in baroque music, holding everything together. Except that she too has a memory trauma to face but the need to calm other people’s fears means she has no one she can confide in.

None of this musicality would work if we weren’t faced with five fractured lives that we care about. But these are people, both in writing and performance, that we desperately care for. And the dilemma is should we care more for the victims, who actually have their own worlds to inhabit, or for their partners, who find themselves faced by people they no longer truly know?

Gwennan went through a car windscreen and is still living in the time just before it happened. Tom is her husband, except that he’s a stranger to her because her husband simply can’t be that old.

Ian Saynor’s Tom is pain and confusion personified, desperately trying to bring his wife back to him. Olwen Rees invests Gwennan with quiet dignity, holding onto her Welsh and not really wanting to emerge from her new, almost ordered, world.

Joe’s brain was injured as a result of an illness and, although he knows there’s nothing wrong with him, he has memory slippages, often from moment to moment. Sarah as an archaeologist is used to piecing together lives from discovered remains but the more she tries to put Joe back together, the more he thinks it’s her that’s behaving oddly.

Celyn Jones’ Joe is superb, his volatility and the reasonableness with which he faces what he sees as extraordinary behaviour in others, is stunningly well judged. Nia Gwynne really makes you feel Sarah’s frustrations. Here is an educated, organised woman who is faced with something that she can do nothing to change and she’s rapidly reaching breaking point.

Mojisola Adebayo is very fine as the doctor. Whether counselling or delivering a lecture she is utterly convincing and the revelation of her own vulnerability makes her isolation particularly poignant.

Phillip Zarrilli’s direction is perfectly paced and nuanced. Fiona Watt’s multi-levelled set is both practical and atmospheric. If the plays to come from Sherman Cymru are only half as good as this, then the future is bright indeed.

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Theatre Wales
Adam Somerset
April 9, 2008

Dense and multi-layered

Previous reviewers have said it but it is worth repeating. “The Almond and the Seahorse” is a dense and multi-layered text, almost too much to take in on one viewing, Happily, Sherman Cymru have wisely followed Theatr Clwyd Cymru and published script and programme in one.

Conditions of mental loss and suffering have been depicted on stage before. Jean-Claude van Itallie dramatised the experience of a stroke from within in “The Traveller.” Simon Gray put paranoia and obsession on stage in “Melon.” Even Alan Ayckbourn wrote of hallucination and collapse in “Woman in Mind.” What marks out Kate O’Reilly’s writing is the skill with which she sets up deep echoes and resonances so that her play vaults beyond its subject of Traumatic Brain Injury. The parallel story of two victims and those left behind is heartbreaking, but the play moves it into wider questions of culture and identity.

She shows how love requires more than an atmosphere of compassion in which to breathe. Archaeologist Sarah is exasperated by husband Joe. He has become kind, well-meaning, likeable and she yearns for the lost grit in his personality. Twenty years the carer of Gwennan, husband Tom has read his Oliver Sacks and Gerald Edelman. What is a personality, he wonders, if it can be changed so abruptly? If we are “ just electrical impulses, carbon matter” what are we worth? In a landscape bereft of divinity, where bodies are burned but refrigerators are interred, the mind sustains itself on illusion. “The poor brain thinks it’s a soul” he says “it thinks it’s immortal.”

Dramatically it could be said that “The Almond and the Seahorse” is lacking in tonal contrast. But then the same might be said of Rothko, or Satie. Like those two Kaite O’Reilly has complete mastery over a territory that is distinctively her own.

Its closest neighbour might be “Black Daisies for the Bride”, Tony Harrison’s voyage via song and metaphor into the world of Alzheimer’s sufferers. Back in 1993 public service broadcasting saw fit to film this prize-winning work. Hundreds of channels later I cannot somehow see this happening in 2008. But “the Almond and the Seahorse” is a rich soundscape, and after the last two performances at Manchester’s Contact Theatre I hope that Ms O’Reilly’s agent is at least badgering radio producers from Portland Place to Llandaff.

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The Stage
Jon Holliday
March 10, 2008

The Almond and the Seahorse

Former plumber Joe (Celyn Jones) had a brain tumour removed two years ago, which has also taken away his short-term memory. His archaeologist partner Sarah (Nia Gwynne) strives to cope while holding down her demanding job. Pregnant Gwennan (Olwen Rees) crashed headfirst through a car windscreen 20 years ago with devastating results. Since then her husband carer (Ian Saynor) cannot break into her world of youthful recall where she no longer recognises anyone, not even her older self in the mirror. The neuropsychologist (Mojisola Adebayo) at the Respite centre the four attended does what she can to explain and encourage, though anything approaching recovery to normality is not on the agenda. Graveyard humour, poetic flights of fancy, intimate confessions, all help relieve the pervading atmosphere of frustration and desperation. The contrasts of mood and pace in the confrontations are beautifully handled, the sensitive ensemble work is quite superb. The unintrusive soundscape by Catherine Clissold-Jones contributes much, though the captions flagged up prove an unnecessary distraction. The effective set and costumes are designed by Fiona Watt. Lighting is by Ace McCarron. The tantalising title refers to the shapes of those sections of the brain responsible for memory and personality traits.

PHOTO CREDITS

Photos by Kirsten Mcternan

books, playsKaite O'ReillyFebruary 29, 2008