VivaSync

Available online
Inspired by a real incident where a woman was barged into the path of an oncoming bus, Sonya Kelly’s play explores proximity and distance

Three lives intersect for just an instant in Sonya Kelly’s intriguing new play for Druid theatre company, livestreamed from the empty Mick Lally theatre in Galway. A speculative game of “what if?”, it takes a real incident from May 2017 as its starting point. When a woman was knocked off the footpath by a male jogger towards an oncoming bus on Putney Bridge in London, a police investigation was launched. The man, who didn’t stop, was never identified.

Commissioned last year to write a new work for Druid in response to the coronavirus pandemic, Kelly presents three unnamed characters’ points of view: the jogger (Aaron Monaghan) late for a crucial interview in the City; the woman (Siobhán Cullen) striding over the bridge, her future opening up before her; the bus driver (Adetomiwa Edun) under pressure to finish his morning shift on time, who manages to swerve to avoid her.

Looking back at what seems a random act, Cullen’s young Irishwoman, embarking on her legal career in London, wonders “why me?” The driver tries to make sense of how close he came to a fatal accident, while the jogger, a financial analyst, realises he can’t change what happened, much as he has bent the truth in the past. This time, there is CCTV footage.

Directed by Sara Joyce, each of these three compelling actors performs directly to camera, in spliced monologues. In its hybrid form of theatre and film, the intricate structure mirrors the play’s themes of proximity and distance, both physical and emotional. At a time when questions about personal space and public space have become fraught, this takes an oblique look at our current enforced separateness.

More serious in tone than Kelly’s previous works – Furniture, How to Keep an Alien – and without those plays’ cracking dialogue, it nonetheless has a clever, teasing quality, especially in its ambiguous ending. Described as a fairytale, it is one that can accommodate commentary on issues of race, postcolonial identities and the assumptions we make about status and social class. All that, while Monaghan and Cullen’s characters maintain six degrees of separation, even during a delicately uplifting waltz.

• Available online until 13 February.

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