Theatre

A 30-minute tour de force? They happen, and when they do they are one of the uniquely condensed pleasures of the Edinburgh Fringe. Dublin-born actor Andrew Scott’s performance in Simon Stephens’ ‘Sea Wall’, first seen at the Bush Theatre in London and now at the Traverse, is unnerving and wonderful to behold. In Stephens’s intense plays, words are often the tip of the iceberg. This short monologue – in which the bottom of a man’s life drops away as suddenly as the Mediterranean sea bed – is no exception. And Scott plays it out beautifully in a teasing performance that tickles the audience like so many salmon until we’re suddenly hooked and wriggling on the horrific event that comes out of a blue sky.

Scott plays a photographer who has everything: beautiful wife, daughter, father-in-law with a holiday home in France. You warm to his suppressed sense of fun and his self-deprecating way of drawing you into his world view - a contented atheist with a puckish sense of humour. Scott picks up the trailing ends of Stephens's sentences and sketches something in the gaps: a half-shaped joke, conjured up by the twist of his eyebrow or, later, the ominous approaching shadow. The comedy, like the life, is light, frolicking pleasantly in froth and the shallows until it suddenly plunges into deep water. In a scientific and Godless era, what will preserve you from despair when that light in your life is extinguished? 30 minutes is just long enough to pose the question, but ‘Sea Wall’ will have you rummaging through your own experiences in search of the answer.

‘Sea Wall’ is playing at the Traverse Theatre, 10 Cambridge Street, Edinburgh.