This Bruntwood Prize-winning play from 2019 took its inspiration—and its odd title—from Cornelia Parker's 1991 art installation Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, which captured a frozen moment in time and space in the midst of an explosion of a garden shed and all of its everyday, forgotten contents accumulated over years. Phoebe Eclair-Powell has turned that into a piece that condenses thirty years in the lives of three couples, whose lives intersect, and condenses them into an interval-less hour and a half or so.
Yes, it starts with a plain-looking shed, which is dismantled slowly by the cast rather than exploded to leave just a frame with a light inside—and Abi (Norah Lopez Holden). The events unfold rather like looking through the mixed contents of someone's shed: in no particular order, from different times and places, gradually building up a picture of six lives.
Naomi (Lizzy Watts) and Frank (Jason Hughes) see in the New Year, 1994, together, marry and go to the Maldives on honeymoon, where they meet older couple Lil (Hayley Carmichael) and Tony (Will Johnson), who have both been married before. Lil seems to detect something wrong in the younger couple's relationship and advises Naomi to run, but she doesn't.
In university halls in 2016, drunken fresher Abi (Norah Lopez Holden) stumbles into Mark's (Michael Workéyè) room in an inauspicious beginning to a new relationship. It turns out that Abi is Naomi and Frank's daughter; we are taken back through the mother-daughter relationship, including teaching her mother the dance to "Hit Me Baby One More Time" and a great sequence in which she is repeating the word "mum" as a toddler then at various ages up to a teenager, ending with "mum, why are you so embarrassing?"
Lil is a nurse; she encounters Naomi again professionally at one point, when her job is under threat because she is taking too much time off to care for Tony, whose dementia is getting much worse, and also comes across Abi at the same hotel as before when she has married Mark—Lil gives her the advice she gave her mother, and this time she tries to take it.
The current year is shown on screens around the balconies, but sometimes it says "NOW". These scenes show Naomi building a garden shed while Frank tries to get her to come inside, but she refuses to speak to or even look at him. This is after the tragic incident that we don't learn for certain until the end, although there are strong hints right at the start.
A lot of scenes show at least two conversations happening at the same time between different couples in different places, sometimes in different years, but there are points where they talk about the same things (pregnancy, lost job) but in different contexts in overlapping dialogue. This could be confusing, but this extremely good cast all handle it very well. It must have been hell to learn.
Atri Banerjee's production moves at a very slick pace on a fairly bare stage from designer Naomi Dawson apart from the shed frame hanging overhead and a triple revolve, onto which the cast chalk key phrases from the script. The actors sit on wooden chairs to one side when they are not in a scene.
This is an intriguing and fascinating play that provides the pleasure of a detective story for allowing the audience to piece together what happened from scattered clues but with a moving, tragic story at the heart of it. It has a very negative take on relationships as nobody seems to be happy for very long, but it is also the second new play I've seen this week that highlights the issue of violence against women, a subject that has, quite rightly, been discussed far more prominently recently.