Review: Prospect Creek

It’s the first Mermaids show of the year! And it could not be more different from the Mermaids shows of last year – which you notice as soon as you walk in the door and are impressed by the extremely fleshed-out set, courtesy of Willa Meloth and Annalise Roberts (who also did the equally lavish lighting and sound respectively). There is all sorts of furniture and no chaise-lounge, a framed bit of embroidery which says ‘I’m glad that I was born to die’ instead of ‘live laugh love’, innumerable other props with a theme of the colour red (important) and, most impressively of all, a large backdrop made of weather-beaten wooden planks, representing the wall of the log cabin in which the entire play is set. The design of this set is above and beyond anything I’ve seen in St Andrews, even Director Lila Patterson’s Mac Beth, which was maybe my favourite show of last year.

ID: Caitlin Conway as the Widow, Eilidh Read as the Kid, and Oliver Windham-Hughes as the Prospector. Credit: Ellen Rowlett.

So the play begins – the music keeps playing and the audience keeps talking, but Caitlin Conway’s Widow (the characters do also have names – she’s called Marianne – but I think calling them by their roles like this works considering the sort of story this is) walks in and tidies up the books, blankets, and cans artistically scattered around. Then the lighting turns colder, the music becomes diegetic (a radio broadcast), the crowd shuts up, and she writes a letter before walking to centre stage and lying down, as if waiting to die. But she’s interrupted by a knock on the door, and has to let in Oliver Windham-Hughes’ Prospector and Eilidh Read’s Kid, who’ve decided to maroon themselves with her over the winter, in search of tungsten.

ID: Caitlin and Oliver. Credit: Ellen Rowlett.

This is by the way a student-written play, something I’m always excited for – it’s by Sofia David, who’s directing The Crucible on Tuesday and Wednesday. The title is deliciously implicative (not just the creek with the actual physical mining prospects, but also the creek where you find hopeful prospects, or where your prospects are washed away), but it is also insanely a real place, an abandoned mining settlement in Alaska and the coldest place in the USA. The cold represents a very real threat of death throughout the play. It is hard to place in time beyond being vaguely mid-20th century, but whatever the time period this is a frontier where the safety of civilisation breaks down. 

The Widow has stuck around after the miners abandoned the settlement. It is clear that she has thoughts or regrets about a life other than the extremely stereotypically heterosexual one she has had, and she has some lovely moments showing off her fun side (spookily holding a torch up under her chin). Still, she will not leave, and goes through the motions of her normal life in Prospect Creek right up until a sudden moment of regret in the last line of the play. The Prospector has a slightly extreme accent, a serious case of toxic masculinity, and a history with the Widow. He wants ‘money, adventure, money, death’ but is secretly caring and so on. He is compared to everyone’s favourite misfit wolf pup White Fang in a very heartwarming scene but unfortunately I never found White Fang all that cute and Oliver is not even a cute puppy so he has no chance. The Kid holds things together and adds some interest to the plot, and also doesn't have any of that weird straight stuff about affairs and gender roles going on, however much the Prospector tries to push them on him. He escaped Producer George Stevens’ poverty-stricken hellhole home, Cornwall, in search of adventure, and he’s polite and sympathetic and easily caught up in things and very excited about science. Eilidh shows impressive charisma, but also range, reflecting the Prospector’s insecurities back on him in one of the play’s many scenes that break out of just boring realism, and saying mysterious and meaningful things about the Inuit myth of the Qalupalik just before the dramatic end.

ID: Eilidh holding Oliver by the chin, with Caitlin in the background. Credit: Ellen Rowlett.

In a foreshadowing-heavy play like this where the end is entirely predictable from the start and the characters move deliberately within specific roles and stereotypes, it is down to the little touches to make the play interesting. The sound and lighting design is excellent, shifting between the cold light and wind and cracking ice of winter, and the slightly too yellow to be real light of dreams and memories, with fades to ominous red inbetween. The actors also contribute to this – Eilidh makes the tapping noises that only the Kid can hear, and Caitlin draws the audience’s eyes moving a flashlight around the theatre before the dramatic reveal at the end. Even though the play is all set in the same room and you know what’s going to happen, there is enough diversity of action and direction that you stay interested throughout. It creates a world very far from St Andrews and from the other plays that go on here. A very fresh start to the new semester of Mermaids plays – unfortunately also a very not-gay one but oh well.

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