Not real people,
just characters,
defamiliarized,
playacting through
the stage dressing
of their
unconvincing, plywood
lives.
In one small spotlight,
one character
is deciding
not to call
the other character,
and a
second spotlight
picks out a
telephone
not ringing, and
the second character,
who could
call the first,
but doesn't.
Between them,
the few metres of
darkened stage
represent the cold,
separating sea, or
their emotional
estrangement, or
the shadowy uknowability of
the inner self, or
something.
They don't elicit sympathy,
these characters, only perhaps
an intellectual empathy,
critical and objective.
They are devices
by which we might learn
some abstract lesson about
the human condition.
They cry, or don't,
soliloquise about their fears,
their guilts and their woundings,
or are silent;
they damage each other,
themselves, and seem
incapable of learning
from pain.
But they are not
real people,
only symbols,
only the roles
they occupy:
Father,
Daughter.
It might be heartbreaking,
if it wasn't all so
far away.