Tinted

Amy Bethan Evans
Scripped Up
The Vaults (studio) Leake Street

Charlotte Eyres as Laura Credit: Georgia Harris Photography
Charlotte Eyres as Laura Credit: Georgia Harris Photography

#NoGreyAreas. That’s what the character Laura spots someone she knows has posted on social media. It stirs up memories of the person and irritates her, because as far as she is concerned, “there are lots of grey areas.”

This gentle monologue, shifts between clips of Laura at various ages in childhood (4, 7,12 etc.) and in adulthood, where she is trying to live independently and tried to achieve a relationship with the man who later posted #NoGreyAreas.

Laura is partially sighted and describes how, as a child left alone by friends on a bus, she became disorientated and frightened because she couldn’t see where she was. Such events probably encouraged her parents to be overprotective and, in turn, that might have contributed to her unworldly innocence.

She insists there was consent to her sexual encounters with her #NoGreyAreas partner, but all the same feels bitter about the way he reacted to the pain she experienced in having sex.

Charlotte Eyres gives a measured, convincing performance as Laura, dressed even as an adult in a childlike blue and white onesy.

However, the brief glimpses of Laura as a child don’t seem to add anything to the central drama of her failed relationship, which is itself only vaguely reported. There was also, in the performance I attended, an imbalance in the sound level so that music drowned Laura’s voice during a few early sections.

Although I was drawn to this play by its claim in the first line of its profile that it “is a revolutionary disabled response to the #metoo”, it didn’t seem to have anything very much to say about #metoo, other than that there are grey areas in the way we regard poor behaviour in a relationship.

Reviewer: Keith Mckenna

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