Reviewed by Lox Dixon.
Pre­sent­ed as a part of the TAHI Fes­ti­val, 2022. 

Effy is a piece of phys­i­cal the­atre per­formed by a masked actor, and fea­tur­ing no ver­bal com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

The show takes place in what osten­si­bly looks like a pub­lic park. A rub­bish bin sits on one side of the stage, an old wood­en bench seat with ornate met­al detail­ing on the sides sits on the oth­er. The tit­u­lar char­ac­ter takes the stage dressed in high vis and armed with a large wood­en broom. They pro­ceed to car­ry out man­u­al labour tasks that read as an attempt to clean up the park area.

From the get-go the nature of the rela­tion­ship between Effy and the park is unclear. At first the sit­u­a­tion reads like they are start­ing their work day, enter­ing from off­stage as if they’ve come from some­where else, clean­ing up the park area and then sit­ting down on the bench to eat their lunch. Lat­er in the show, Effy curls up to sleep on the bench, and I start to won­der whether they live here, or spend their days here vol­un­tar­i­ly clean­ing rather than as an employ­ment arrange­ment.

There are two things that are abun­dant­ly clear as the per­for­mance unfolds: Effy strug­gles to do a range of every­day things that most peo­ple would not strug­gle with, and Effy is lone­ly but des­per­ate to con­nect. The first plays out as evi­dent as Effy attempts to eat lunch and has a com­i­cal strug­gle with both the glad­wrap on their sand­wich, and a pair of rub­ber gloves.

The sec­ond is clear from the get-go, every action Effy takes is fol­lowed up with a look out to the audi­ence. The expres­sion on the mask, which reads from neu­tral to slight­ly pained through the dif­fer­ent light­ing sequences and changes in phys­i­cal­i­ty from the actor (Brid­get Sanders), comes across as seek­ing our approval, or at the very least look­ing to con­nect with us.

The nar­ra­tive struc­ture is often hard to inter­pret giv­en the non-ver­bal nature of the piece, but the things I can say for sure are that this show fea­tures an epic recur­ring strug­gle between Effy and a duck, explores Effy’s need to express them­self cre­ative­ly, and shows us that Effy is a per­son des­per­ate to make con­nec­tions with oth­er liv­ing things.

This show invites us to think about what human con­nec­tion looks like, offers a com­pelling look into neu­ro­di­ver­gence, and leaves us both feel­ing a bit sor­ry for Effy who seems to long for a friend, and feel­ing a bit sor­ry for our­selves as we rem­i­nisce on moments where we have tried our best to con­nect as our most authen­tic selves, and been reject­ed or held back because of soci­etal norms.

The lev­el of nar­ra­tive able to be told, and the emo­tion­al res­o­nance of the show (includ­ing a healthy dose of laugh out loud humour through­out), are no easy achieve­ment for a show rely­ing for the most part on the phys­i­cal per­for­mance of the actor on stage, and on the light and sound cues being expert­ly timed. Every­one involved in this show should be proud, and if the above sounds like a show you would enjoy, I high­ly rec­om­mend see­ing it.