Jamie Cavanagh in Sea Wall, Bright Young Things, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied.

Sea Wall (Stage 34, Roots on Whyte Community Building

Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s entirely possible you won’t see anything at the Fringe to touch the combination of delicacy and shattering power in Sea Wall, an exquisite 40-minute solo portrait of a man by the British playwright Simon Stephens. And in this Bright Young Things production directed by Belinda Cornish it gets a performance to match from Jamie Cavanagh.

Why?, the ultimate, terrible, elusive existential question, hangs over Sea Wall and suffuses it in a way that takes grief, loss, and love into a vast uncharted dimensions of human existence. In half-articulated fragments that seem to be coming direct from memory in Cavanagh’s performance, Alex is reflecting on a story as he tells it (now there’s a subtle distinction), in tiny shards, self-interruptions, annotations, asides. It’s about a trip with his wife and little daughter to the south of France, where his father-in-law has a house.

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What emerges, in Stephens’ beautifully calibrated writing and Alex’s telling — the pauses really count, in this conversation with himself — is a man struggling to capture now and in retrospect the exhilarating mystery of pure love, the sense of fully inhabiting it within and without. And then … its loss.

The production happens without theatrical lighting. As a photographer Alex is fascinated by light — how it can capture the human dimension, how it can vanish. And the production happens without theatrical lighting, on purpose. The bed of the sea, as he learns first-hand, isn’t a gradual slope. The sea wall is precipitous. It falls off into dark fathomless depths. The implications for human happiness, poised as it is on a fragile moment in time, are the quintessence of that why? question.

The only prop at Cavanagh’s disposal is a kettle, and a cup (which he never touches after setting them up). Ah, and Stephens’ marvellous writing. And his performance as a man grappling to understand the unthinkable thinks between the lines. Language keeps leaving off. I can’t tell you more than this: you mustn’t miss Sea Wall. It stops me in my tracks as I’m writing this.