The closed loop of an island family is bounded on the inside and outside by violence. Life performs its rigid and terrifying circuit until one by one each child flees into the night—choosing the totality of external chaos over continuing to face it on two fronts along a worn track where hope died a generation before.

David, the last to flee breaks the island, the circuit, and the camel’s back. In a psychotherapist’s salon the fragments of the island are hallucinated back into a narrative loop of double-bind despair. But this time round with a less unbeautiful—and more foreign—prospect.

Coward’s Soup

Coward’s Soup is a dramatic distillation of a menacing encounter between two brothers on the passing of their father. The anticipated death also confronts them with the divide between their past and present lives, their ambivalence towards their father and each other, and the vacancy of power that has emerged. In the presence of each other they must face old fears and ideas about justice, and about their own position in the political world of their upbringing that has since changed considerably. Neither can afford to assert their will now without dire consequences for the other, and those consequences can neither be predicted nor controlled.

Li’l Hat & Hold Still

Li’l Hat & Hold Still are two related plays on the loss of self in an intimate relationship, the fear this arouses, and the desperate attempts to keep the inexorable at bay without foreclosing on the last—perhaps only—mutually consenting intimacy one has known. This, while not forfeiting one’s privilege—which may indeed be a right—to ongoing consent, arguably the final value by which human dignity is exercisable and thereby recognizable to oneself and to others.

But when the cost of No or Stop fluctuates too high, and Yes seems out of the question, one is left to one’s primitive resources to move forward. That is to say one is alone and trapped. In Li’l Hat, a couple struggles to kindle a dormant connection through a meaningless act of physical intimacy, the pursuit of which is violent in its relentlessness. Only when all hope appears shattered do they find their connection. In Hold Still an act of grooming turns into an imaginary nightmare of voyeurism and vulnerability that must be transformed into destructive reality for it to end.