Editors Note: This review is part of theatrebristol.net's second open Mayfest Audience Reviews Project, and the opinions contained are soley those of the author and not those of Theatre Bristol as an organisation, nor should they be attributed as such. For more information about the reviews project contact editor@theatrebristol.net

'Its about gut feelings;' 

The doors are thrown open and we are hurried into the darkened space, into the lifeboats. Plenty of room in our lifeboat for just the four of us, the others are chock full. Three lifeboats adrift, all of us uncertain, what will be expected of us? What should we be looking at?

'fight, flight and freeze reactions;'

A patch of light picks out a woman, close at hand. She talks to us about the body, its reactions, its reflexes, the way we speed up or slow down in response to our surroundings.  As she tells us of more extreme examples, our bodies find their own rhythm and tempo in response to this experience. Our attention is shifted from woman, to screen, to man, to screen, to song... Wise men say, only fools rush in... but I can't help falling in love with you...

'impulse, love and undefended moments.'

When the performers step into the lifeboats, our experience is transformed. A woman nervously handles a handkerchief full of chalk rocks, whilst talking of how it might look to a whale when the sun glints on a man's hair as he stands at the brink of Beachy Head.  A man approaches, friendly, familiar, he reads the gut of one of our fellow castaways, using an ultrasound device, cold gloop smeared on her belly.  'This shadow here… I can see a problem at work,' he says.  'And just here, I can see land.'  A woman steps into the boat.  She places a blister pack of seasickness tablets on my upturned palm, and the projects a small film onto it, in which she is afloat on the sea, on a pink lilo.  'Floating on my own exhalations.  … Every inhalation is hope,' she says. 'Every exhalation...' becomes a list: images of scenes that our out-breath might become.  The three interventions occur simultaneously, one in each lifeboat. We can no longer try to pick out everything, so we follow our instincts, our gut reactions, and our noses.

Besides this cinema that I briefly held in the palm of my hand, the film in this work is projected onto two screens simultaneously on opposite sides of the space: one is a deflated life boat, the surface rippled and worn.  The other, much bigger, is the permanent cinema screen, the use of which to me set a limit or horizon on how far away we floated on this dark sea.  Seeing the footage on the rough canvas surface gave it a patina and place within the work, and yet I found myself looking to the cinematic, flat image almost for confirmation of what the 'real' picture should show.  Once I'd given up the urge to see and take in everything, I found that my impulse was to turn my back on the big screen, not let it swallow things up, and enjoy the textured, distorted footage. 

The moment when the two elder dancers, Geoff McGarry and Rene Newby, appeared on screen, the work shifted again – a sea change – becoming warmer, softer and more contained. Then, to see Geoff walk out into the space, circling round in his dance, adrift alone, was powerful. 

A moment with a pair of walkie-talkies, one held by Geoff as he danced, carrying Joseph Young’s voice around the space, was just one highlight for me from a beautifully layered and evocative soundscore, another being the echo of church bells from earlier in the work as Helen Paris lowered herself slowly into the sea on a knotted old rope.

The work continued to steer us in surprising directions throughout, culminating in the very moving duet between Geoff and Rene, live and powerfully present, balancing an apple between their foreheads as they danced together, which then descended into comedy as we were all given an apple between two and invited to join them in a final dance, bringing us back into our own bodies as we leave.

'Did you like it?' said Rene, as I was clambering out of the lifeboat.  Yes very much, I said.  She nodded, 'Different, isn't it?'

'Set inside the belly of a whale.'