Carl walks into a cafe in Swansea where Hayley works as a waitress. She used to know his brother and fancied Carl, 20 years ago. Hayley suggests a date; numbers, messages and kisses are exchanged, then Hayley becomes Carl’s girlfriend.
Katherine Chandler’s play is a fictionalised account of the real-life story of Stacey Gwilliam who in 2015, after being violently attacked by her partner on the Swansea Bay coastal path, managed to crawl out of the shallow grave in which she had been left for dead. It is not an easy watch.
From the outset, on Lulu Tam’s stage, gritted with sand and filled with jagged Perspex edges, Chandler’s script possesses a dangerous volatility: men are not who they appear to be, the faith of children in responsible adults is misplaced, and violence flares up with terrifying regularity. It is a complex, challenging exploration of domestic abuse and particularly of its insidious, coercive oppressiveness (emphasised by Alexandra Faye Braithwaite’s soundscape), where a glance can have unimaginably distressing consequences.
