Eight characters drift in and out of each other's lives in Breathing Space, falteringly trying to overcome their vulnerability and hurt in a culture of anonymity and fragmentation. A journalist with lofty ambitions of surpassing Pasternak, an insecure depressive and a struggling Pollyanna are among the angst-ridden misfits seeking respite from their past or present.
Ultimately offering warm glimmers of hope, Breathing Space is an original and sophisticated investigation into how a group of unlikely characters transcend cultural difference and attempt, in a variety of idiosyncratic ways to genuinely communicate. Through each other, they eventually find the strength to want to return to a literal, an emotional or a spiritual home.
Deceptively simple, Moggie Douglas's unobtrusive white set allows the actors the freedom to move fluidly from scene to scene, using nothing but chairs to evoke a park, an aeroplane or an office. Four symmetrical shapes suspended above three raised platforms appear as windows without glass or frames without images. In a series of vibrant tableaux, the astutely inter-linked characters create the casual colour of the piece, bringing a quirky, off-beat humour as well as chillingly real emotion to the play.
Breathing Space is a joint project between Theatre West Glamorgan and the Tipperary-based Galloglass Theatre Company. The actors, four Welsh and four Irish, embrace the characters they were initially responsible for devising with admirable energy. Their perceptive performances are enhanced by Ken Bourke's witty, well-crafted script which slowly pulls the disparate parts of the play into a philosophical and cohesive unit.
Runs tomorrow and Friday at the Presentation Secondary School, Wexford, at 8.30 p.m. To book phone 053-23764, and then tours to Wales.
