Isabella Waldron’s delicate play stages an unusual meet cute: eyes connecting over a spilled tray of glass eyes. You don’t see that every day.
Bea (Nell Barlow) is an ocularist about to give a lecture at London’s Wellcome Institute, but she’s in a bit of a state. Flustered, fumbling her file cards, more than moist with anxiety (“I sweated through a coat once”), she’s hiding out in a storeroom when another woman (Alice Franziska) comes in cradling a birthday cake. Cue the rolling eyes and Bea gabbling her life story, or at least her love story.
In flashback, 17-year-old Bea meets an intriguing older neighbour, Margot (Olivia Dowd). Margot makes medical wax figures, painstakingly crafting “hideous diseases in 3D form”. It’s an arrestingly niche calling, and Bea falls for both the art and the artist. In Margot’s flat, smelling of “stewed apple and stamps”, she gets to experience the joy of wax and soon she’s making eyes at and for Margot, and her detailed recreations of gout, plague and pox. It’s a teenage idyll of painting fine red lines on artificial eyeballs, during which Bea also encounters her first ciggie, her first kiss, her first love.
