Always so free

The first production of work by Coventry-based playwright and poet Inigo Purcell was compact in every sense. The one-act Always So Free runs for under half an hour, and was performed in one of the artists’ studios above Coventry’s best cafe The Tin Angel.

The set occupies the whole of this space, which consists of kitchen complete with worktop, living room with mini-hearth, and a bare study. When the performance began, the audience lined the narrow corridor between these three spaces.

Beforehand the audience wandered around the set making the usual judgements about the book collection and stack of LPs in the kitchen, relishing the complementary cake and tea, and chatting with the charming cast and production team.

The opening is brilliant and one that the writer doesn’t waste. Instead of going for the obvious high-dramatic possibilities the audience is led into a slow unravelling of the characters’ histories.

The three-hander performance tells the story of Hannah (Charlie Lester) fresh from her A-Levels and invested with a believable naivety, trainee solicitor Simon (James Purcell) and Anita (Hannah Laurens), the golden girl whose university career, we discover, was ravaged by mental illness.

Purcell’s handling of dialogue and narrative deferral is excellent, although the self-stoppages and trailing sentences pile up a bit too much.

The awkwardness of exchanges had the bleak comic charge of Charlie Kaufmann’s scripts. Purcell plays Simon through metaphorical gritted teeth, uptight and fraught, knocking back Calvados, aptly revealing the disappointment behind his hostility and self-justification. Purcell uses the Chekhovian trope of despair, haunting the edges of the quotidian to express the hurtling trajectory of life choices.

Mundane speech and actions are never neglected by the writer but instead become sights for dramatic interest. Small but full of good things, this is a wonderful production, and we hope to see and hear more from Purcell soon.