#1. Blink

Original cast: Harry McEntire and Rosie Wyatt

Blink by Phil Porter

Premiered at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh (2 August 2012)

Published by Oberon Modern Plays

So here goes, play number one is Phil Porter’s Blink, a punchy two-hander. Blink tells the story of outsiders Jonah and Sophie. Jonah moves from his sheltered Presbyterian home to a flat Leytonstone, East London. Sophie had lived with her father, until his recent death. With the unbidden delivery of a video baby monitor, connected to a camera in Sophie’s flat, Jonah begins to observe her while she pretends to be unaware. Eventually the safety found in the distance of this voyeurism is disturbed when Jonah figures out that she is in the flat upstairs, and their connection spills out into the real world.

"Love is not a cast iron set of symptoms. Love is whatever you feel it to be. Love is neither dirty nor clean." Jonah

The first line comes from Jonah; “This is a true story, and it’s a love story.” This playfully opens what is a wonderfully theatrical play, turning the characters’ audience address into two people confiding in the audience their own experience of a relationship. As a form of memory play, Porter relishes the opportunities for dissonance in the recollection of events between Jonah and Sophie, and finds real humour and silliness in their story. Porter has mastered audience address in this piece, creating a real depth and need in his characters.

For the first part of the play Jonah and Sophie seem to be in separate worlds, not engaging with the other. Then suddenly, the worlds cross over, with both Jonah and Sophie filling in for characters in the other’s story but without necessarily fully becoming them. There is a rather fun stage direction on the first instance of this; “If there’s a brief moment of confusion at the point of transition, all the better.” There are clear indications throughout the script that the piece acknowledges its own theatricality, which opens up lots of opportunities for play in performance. It also bridges the gap in the storytelling, allowing key scenes to become immediate rather than recounted.

Eventually, of course, the two characters interact themselves, as their stories gradually align. This process is beautifully drawn by Porter; he finds all the opportunities for mundane absurdity and surprise in the inevitability of their meeting. It is then even sweeter when the two finally have a conversation, decoding the layers of fantasy the audience have been complicit in them building around themselves.

Porter delivers one final surprise, just as it seems the play may veer off into sentimentality. There is no fairy tale ending; no neat bow. There is a feeling in this that the audience is being given the story up until now, but it will go on and who knows what might happen next week, or next year. It lives up to Jonah’s description of love in his opening speech; “Love is not a cast iron set of symptoms. Love is whatever you feel it to be. Love is neither dirty nor clean.”

With that description in mind, it then becomes apparent that while telling the central, albeit unconventional ‘love story’, Porter examines other forms of love in Jonah and Sophie’s lives. Be it their relationship with their parents, estate agents, doctors, random strangers that they collide with in the street, or the mangy fox that lives in the garden.

In this emerges the idea of love growing out of a need. Jonah and Sophie certainly need each other, and indeed have a certain need for the other characters that cameo in their lives – yes, even the mangy fox! But that said, in Porter’s play that doesn’t diminish the validity of the love. The final resolution suggests a very natural ebb and flow of relationships, and through even the most fleeting of these relationships we may come to find a better understanding of who we are.

Photo by Sheila Burnett

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