SEA LIFE

Bristol New Vic

For many people, the end of the year is a time for morose retrospection. As soon as the final cracker is pulled, an air of decay and deterioration settles over the fag-end of the year. Another calendar goes in the bin, a grim reminder of the remorseless tick of time. A perfect time of year, therefore, to stage the premiere of Lucy Catherine's new play, Sea Life: a play about death, coastal erosion, and the bleak void within a person's soul.

The story concerns three siblings who take family disfunctionality to vertiginous heights. Eldest brother Eddie (John Berlyne) spends his time digging up his dead relatives before the graveyard disappears over the crumbling cliff edge. His sister Roberta (Robin Weaver) lives in a romanticised past made up of rose-tinted pseudo-memories. And her twin brother Bob derives his identity entirely from his sister, and dives into displacement DIY at times of emotional stress.

Their job is to exhume the inhabitants of the town's rapidly-eroding cemetery on behalf of an American company which specialises in 'grief containment and after-death products'. Unfortunately, the crematorium's behind schedule and there are bodies stashed all over the house. This is potentially the setting for a cracking dark farce, but Catherine is a far more sophisticated playwright than that. There is comedy, it is true, and the humour comes in one colour: funereal black. But the laughs merely serve to 'reculer pour mieux sauter' into the murky emotional depths of coping with loss and the sense that something - in this case a mother's love - has always been missing from one's life. Eddie is a crippled soul who envies the closeness of his twin siblings. Roberta, meanwhile, escaped into the mythology of her mind where she is now helplessly trapped. And Bob is only half a person, fighting desperately to hang on to his defining twin. It takes a grotesque catharsis with a decaying corpse to snap their mental bonds.

Catherine's script explores the emotions involved with great perspicacity and subtlety. This is matched by director Gareth Machin's remarkable ability to bring out the best in his actors, giving a performance in which the directorial touch is all but invisible, yet absolutely crucial. Berlyne plays Eddie's blend of anger and pleading with extraordinary force, and Warner delivers both Roberta's simplicity and her anguish with remarkable naturalism.

There is only one sign that Lucy Catherine is not yet the polished and mature playwright into which she will undoubtedly grow, and that is that she does not appear to know when to stop. Sea Life has a number of 'false endings', followed by a sudden twist into an incongruous Alice in Wonderland world where the characters talk in riddles. One is therefore left with a sense of an outstanding play which has been over-embellished in order to lend it a higher 'art' content. Up until the last fifteen minutes, Sea Life is a stunning piece, and an excellent example of the tightly woven emotional contemplation in which Catherine excels. All she needs now is the confidence to recognise that less is more.

TOBY O'CONNOR MORSE

To 13 January. Box office (0117) 987 7877