Tag Archives: Nina Bowers

OUR COSMIC DUST

★★★

Park Theatre

OUR COSMIC DUST

Park Theatre

★★★

“charmingly human and unique”

“Our Cosmic Dust” takes a heavy topic and makes it light. Paradoxically, it looks at its subject matter through a child’s eye and, by doing so, tackles the mechanisms of grief and loss with a clarity and maturity that can only come from the honesty of innocence. The emotions are loud and big, but writer and director Michinari Ozawa’s play is quiet and intimate while also allowing touches of comedy to seep into the narrative – a brave choice, like someone telling jokes at a wake.

The central character is Shotaro, a curious schoolboy who spends his night counting the stars and wondering how many more unseen stars there are in the ‘dark bits in between’. Voiced by Hiroki Berrecloth, Shotaro is brought to life in puppet form. Berrecloth is pulling the strings and through his subtle and sensitive performance he layers rich expression onto the mute, blank face of the marionette. Shotaro believes his late father is up among the stars but realises that it is humanly impossible to get there to go and look for him. Instead, he opts to search for answers closer to home. ‘Where do people go when the die?’ is his recurring question.

His mother, Yoko, finds him missing one day. What is brushed over in Ozawa’s play is the unwitting selfishness of the boy – a pointed stab at the fact that the mother is not allowed, or given time, to grieve for herself. After all she is recently widowed, but the child pulls focus. Yoko has to remain useful as the mother in search of the son in search of the father. Millie Hikasa visually expresses these conflicting emotions, while also conveying the fear of a mother losing a child. The ensuing journey mercifully gives us some light relief. The characters that Shotaro, and then Yoko, meet all adopt childlike mannerisms that keep the adult world at bay. We enter a vaguely Dr. Seuss type world as we wander from the hospital to the crematorium to the planetarium.

Nina Bowers gives a delightful performance as nurse Tara who keeps her memories locked away in the silver tooth of her late mother. Sweary and naturally crude, she teams up with Yoko on their search, enlisting crematorium worker, Alastair (Hari Mackinnon), with all his fragile and tearful rashness; and finally, the matter-of-fact keeper of the planetarium, Orion (Ian Hallard in fine form). Each persona represents various viewpoints of the sweeping spirituality versus science debate. Without lecturing, the dialogue throws innocence and experience into the pit to gently fight it out.

Eika Shimbo’s video backdrops dominate the space, occupying the entire back wall. Predominantly monochrome, there is a childish simplicity to the animation that prevents the audience being fully swept into the three-dimensional world of its characters. Our imaginations are teased but the scale of the graphics sits uneasily with the piece. Too dominant to echo the workings of our protagonists’ thoughts, yet not quite grand enough to draw us into the cosmic odyssey we are promised. Tomohiro Kaburagi’s sound evokes stronger emotions, along with the music of Orenograffiti (ORENOTE) with its ethereal pads, rhythms and lush strings.

Translated from Ozawa’s Japanese original by Susan Momoko Hingley, the dialogue is sharp, and it travels well. It is difficult to disguise the over simplified sentimentality of its conclusion, however. It has come full circle during which its orbit has been more fascinating than its destination. The young Shotaro has needed guidance but seeking it he has shown that we all need it. Loss, grief and longing isn’t the preserve of the young or the old – it is universal, and Ozawa has presented this in a charmingly human and unique way.



OUR COSMIC DUST

Park Theatre

Reviewed on 6th June 2025

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Pamela Raith

 


 

 

Last ten shows reviewed at this venue:

OUTPATIENT | ★★★★ | May 2025
CONVERSATIONS AFTER SEX | ★★★ | May 2025
FAREWELL MR HAFFMANN | ★★★★ | March 2025
ONE DAY WHEN WE WERE YOUNG | ★★★ | March 2025
ANTIGONE | ★★★★★ | February 2025
CYRANO | ★★★ | December 2024
BETTE & JOAN | ★★★★ | December 2024
GOING FOR GOLD | ★★★★ | November 2024
THE FORSYTE SAGA | ★★★★★ | October 2024
AUTUMN | ★★½ | October 2024

 

 

 

OUR COSMIC DUST

OUR COSMIC DUST

OUR COSMIC DUST

Dear Elizabeth

Dear Elizabeth
★★

Gate Theatre

Dear Elizabeth

Dear Elizabeth

Gate Theatre

Reviewed – 23rd January 2019

★★

 

“the cold reading approach precludes us form caring about the characters and is an unfortunate roadblock before we even start on their journey”

 

The playwright Sarah Ruhl came across the lives of American poets, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, reading a book of letters between them. She found there was “something deeply compelling about the way these two lives intersected”. The letters, which span three decades from 1947 to 1977, tell the story of their relationship that defies easy definition. It wasn’t quite a friendship, nor a love affair: they seldom met, and both lived independent lives: Bishop was a lesbian and Lowell was with a variety of women. But they put their entire lives into language for the other. This intangible, intense connection forms the basis of Ruhl’s “Dear Elizabeth” which dramatises the beauty wrought from simple correspondence.

First produced at Yale Repertory Theatre in 2012 and later in New York, director Ellen McDougall has added an extra dimension by casting a different pair of actors each night and having them perform unprepared. It’s a fascinating idea, one that can potentially give a real edge to the drama, yet it is easy to go over that edge and into the pitfalls that come with this experimental approach.

The actors (on the evening of this review; Phoebe Fox and Nina Bowers) discover the story of the person they are representing as they go along. This can occasionally be awkward but gives an authentic messiness to the performances which reflects the intended ‘life-as-it-is-lived’ intention of the piece. Fox and Bowers quickly fall into time with the rhythm of the text and shed their self-consciousness. However, the cold reading approach precludes us form caring about the characters and is an unfortunate roadblock before we even start on their journey. There is a flicker of redemption towards the end when Fox relates a desperately moving account of Elizabeth Bishop’s lover’s, Lota de Maceda Soares, suicide; but it is all a bit too late.

Surreal moments promise to break up the fairly static narrative; during which, in parlour game fashion, the actors react to stage directions they are given. But these theatrical devices fail to get to the heart of the matter. Bishop’s alcoholism is clumsily touched upon by the appearance of a bottle of rubbing alcohol and Lowell’s chronic depression earmarked by a pillbox of tablets spilled onto the table.

In an interview Ruhl professes to asking herself “why am I so captivated” by the poets’ lives. A rhetorical question with an obvious answer: the letters themselves are an intimately honest documentation of two bruised souls opening up to each other. In McDougall’s hands though, Ruhl might be prompted to ask the same question again.

 

Reviewed by Jonathan Evans

 

 

Dear Elizabeth

Gate Theatre until 9th February

 

 

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