Liberated from the restraints of childhood and not yet claimed or confined by the responsibilities of adulthood, life in your 20s can be, as Kirby Thompson and Orla Graham’s Float at Belfast’s The Mac suggests, both the best and the worst of times, to paraphrase one of their illustrious predecessors.
Produced by the Belfast-based Crybaby Productions and first seen at the Dublin Fringe Festival in 2023, the portrait of four female university students revelling in new-found freedom and recoiling from the brute consequences that lie in its wake is the latest demonstration of new, young talent making its mark on Northern Irish theatre. Seen at The Mac last year after its Dublin première, it returns again to the venue for a short run en route to the Edinburgh Fringe in August.
This second play by Thompson (who co-directs with Caoimhe McGee) and Graham (who also performs) is marked by the strengths and shortcomings of early endeavours.
Lurking within the youthful hedonism of university life—a “golden age” filled with a “constant sense of freedom”—lie treacherous reefs hidden beneath surface liberality and gaiety. Here it’s a traumatic sexual assault that forces the quartet of friends to suddenly confront grim realities and grow up in an unequal world whose masculine mores are stacked against them.
Written with an unfettered energy that perfectly captures the liberating largesse of university life, Float makes much early on of the formative experience of fresh-found, all-embracing friendships. It’s a veritable Eden gleefully inhabited by Graham, Leah Williamson, Ellen Andrews and Annina Noelle Watton, whose admirably enthusiastic performances are subsequently tempered, if only fitfully, by the assault that ruptures their innocence and friendship.
It’s in the working out of the aftermath of the rape of Andrews’s Erin where friendships are torn asunder before being uneasily repaired that Float begins to stumble. Here the focus starts to blur with the doubling of actors as errant boyfriend, therapist and third-person, fourth wall-breaking narrators not always persuasive. A curious philosophising overview sounds unconvincing, its happy ending feeling rather contrived.
Even so, there is a zesty energy in the writing and a feistiness in the playing that captures the thrills and spills of student life with recognisable aplomb, and that bodes well for the young company.