Fresh from the 2013 Hightide Festival in Suffolk, this production of Moth has found a well-suited home in the attic of the Bush Theatre.
It’s a tiny black box full of opportunities and heat in equal measure; Moth is a fantastic short play that skips exuberantly on to Uxbridge Road with a whole load of credit in tow, and thankfully, the standards aren’t slipping.
Jordan Mifsúd, in the lead role as Sebastian, is a tremendous actor, and you’d be hard pushed to find one who works as hard as he does on stage; his performance perfectly juvenile and heartbreaking, we want to believe that he’s been told to save the world by a robot, and adore that he carries a moth in his bag, tapping lightly on the inside of a jar.
Stacey Gregg plays a credible, self-contained and very defenceless Claryssa with a whole breadth of accents in her remit. She, together with Mifsúd, demonstrates perfectly the ugly things that can come with being a teenager.
This fast-paced, interchanging production whereby the two performers play a vast range of roles leaves us almost as disorientated as Sebastian probably is. Whilst the actors grapple with the different characters admirably—ranging from themselves, each other, their parents, their teachers, bullies and robots—the sheer volume of switches that Declan Greene penned is perhaps a little relentless.
None of this would have been half as fantastic without the superb lighting design by Jack Knowles, and George Dennis’s atmospheric and ethereal sound design. Direction by Prasanna Puwanarajah has made this a slick, smooth-running performance which switches from hilarious to heartbreaking effortlessly.
Greene has penned a play that’s wholly meaningful, and one to lose yourself in.