THEATRE REVIEW - THAT CAN'T HAVE HAPPENED King's Arms, Salford

 

'That Can't Have Happened' will be director David Thacker's second production so far this year in collaboration with Rising Moon Productions at Salford's King's Arms pub theatre, and his third production there to date. The play came about through Thacker accepting a proposal that he should create a play from transcripts of some of the women who have experienced domestic abuse and been helped by the charity Fortalice. Thacker therefore worked very closely with Fortalice and took the testimonies of five such women. He then used these verbatim dialogues and wove them into a 90 minute play. What we hear about these characters' situations and what they were made to go through then is all the more harrowing knowing that these things actually happened. Fortalice is a Bolton-based charity which supports and helps women and children who are caught in the melee of domestic abuse - and as we were shown, this does not necessarily manifest itself in physical terms, but can be emotional and coercive too. 

Entering the auditorium, we were presented with the chairs neatly arranged in a full circle, and the five cast members seated in amongst us. The premise here being that we were all in a therapy / focus group meeting at Fortalice and these five women spoke about their abuse, their relationships, their life, and their eventual escape from its clutches and of course their time at Fortalice and how this charity has helped and supported them to regain their lives and independence. This was a brave idea, and a choice that paid off excellently - for a short while. Having these actresses seated in amongst us was both intimate and inclusive, we felt much more a part of their stories, and they became all the more real because of it; I even felt myself wanting to go over to one of them and put my arm around her! But it is not an easy ask for the actresses to be so close and so personal with audience members, and they coped with this superbly and adroitly. However, my slight misgivings here are that this is essentially a theatre production, and this idea became both boring and very static when that is all that happened. The entire 90 minutes of the play was motionless and the central acting space never used. We needed just a little bit more from a piece of theatre.

My other misgiving follows on from this. I understand obviously that the charity Fortalice is sponsoring this production and the play would not have been possible without their first approaching the production team; so it is very hard to criticise when the remit of this play is a corporate one, but the many mentions and adulations of Fortalice, especially in the second half, did, for a public performance, feel a little like overkill. 

The five actresses taking on these real-life characters were Vicky Binns, Bel Odawa, Isabel Ford, Flo Wilson, and Eve Steele. All five were "real" and we completely bought into their characterisations and stories, Binns especially impressing. 

REVIEWER - Alastair Zyggu

on - 19.3.25