What's On
‘Look out the window, the city gleams, it shines as if big black
cats came and snogged it all over.’
Only two people emerge from the wreckage of a just crashed school
coach - Beth, a young pupil frantic to claim an identity not at all
her own, and Miss, a nervous, newly qualified teacher whose first
response to disaster is to call the register. In this strange,
unsettling territory of shattered glass and bent metal, a world
dominated by missing adolescents and unaccounted for drivers, logic
and memory are also lost - and so the pair attempt to reconstruct
the absent passengers and their own past lives through litter, left
behind relics and storytelling.
Meanwhile, Sally and Jim watch the case of the
missing coach unfold on the news as they struggle to come to terms
with their son Adam's suicide. Sally decides she has every right to
reorder, even rewrite, Adam's past. She decides to ignore what she
refers to “the accident” (but which her husband and
neighbours call “murder”) and remember her son as
a bright, loving child forever bringing home new swimming badges.
For this couple intimacy has been reduced to a shared ten minutes in
bed - Sally checking her breasts for cancer as Jim investigates his
balls for signs of the same.
How Hard it Happens
urges that truth can occur in any number of
different versions and goes to question who we should most readily
believe:
The mother, the media, the immediate
situation, the moment, the imagination or the memory?
Winner of ‘Special Award for Innovation’
and ‘Best Actress’ for Elisabeth Hopper at the Manchester In-Fringe
Theatre Awards 2008
“superb individual
performances and fluid dialogue…this is a moving piece of innovative
drama.” 8/10, Student Direct -
http://www.student-direct.co.uk/entertainment/how-hard-it-happens-how-it-hardly-seems-happen
“big talents form Heart Off Guard Theatre
Company” The Herald, on Beowulf, 2007
how hard it happens will be performed at
the Edinburgh Fringe Festival at Sweet Teviot Place, 18th
– 25th August, 2.30pm.
Sweet Teviot Place is situated few yards
from Bristo Square, housed within the historic buildings of
Edinburgh University Medical School.
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