The Sea is simultaneously a gloriously confusing and a wise affair. Like the sea itself, it has many moods and undercurrents and is unpredictable, beautiful, awe-inspiring and terrifying. Edward Bond has used the sea as a metaphor for life, and this production by the Oxford Theatre Guild makes a great success, with fantastic acting and great costumes and sets, of displaying the full ambitious scope of the play.

Set in a small town on the east coast of England just before the First World War, the opening scene is one of drama and tragedy. Two young men are caught in a violent storm and their boat capsizes; only one of the men survive. The dead man is a local boy, part of the tight knit community that inhabits the town and engaged to a local girl. The reactions to the tragedy, from bizarre to touching, illustrate not only the individual characters, but also the dynamic of the town, and this forms the crux of the play. Throughout, the sea is used as a tool for the narrative. It is a constant that magnifies the myriad of moods and emotions that ripple through the town: 'People who live by the sea never get away from its sound. It murmurs, roars, soothes, threatens and shifts like an unanswered question.' (From the author's notes.)

So we have Mr Hatch, the local Draper (played excellently by the understudy Joseph Kenneway), who at face value is calm, upright, and responsible. But under the surface there lurks a neurotic, paranoid man who is "over-imaginative for a draper" and convinced of the existence of aliens and their role in the tragic death. The sea to Hatch is a body of the unknown; it is immense in its secrets and is inexplicable. His journey in the play is one of breakdown and insanity, overwhelmed by what he cannot control.

And there is Mrs Rafi, the matriarch of the piece, extrovert, eccentric and formidable, played with brilliance by Jenny Austen. In her, the sea is powerful, unstoppable. She is both a delight and the cause of despair, yet utterly entrancing. Without her the ebb and flow and life of the place would be gone. The character is at once the picture of propriety and the creator of chaos. By holding the moral high ground and refusing to purchase material from Hatch after he has revealed his theories, she pushes the man over the edge into insolvency and breakdown. At the same time, she is also the source of a great deal of humour and entertainment - the scene where she rehearses the annual local play, in which she also stars, is hilarious. Yet, in a superb monologue towards the end of the piece, she touchingly reveals that she is aware of her ridiculousness and bossiness, but also that she cannot escape the role she has created for herself. For her, the sea is chaos and unpredictability. It reflects changing moods and times, melodrama, arguments, but also forgiveness and, occasionally, calm.

The last of the key characters is Evens, the "wise fool" who lives in a hut on the beach and is feared by all for his unorthodox ways, and who is in fact the sanest of the lot by far. He has opted out of this fight against the sea. He has accepted it for all its wonders and mysteries, and so is more at peace with the world than any of the other characters. His stillness of mind provides another constant for the audience as the other characters become increasingly intense and eccentric in their behaviour. This intensity becomes hysteria, as the pace of the play crescendos with the debacle of the funeral, where chaos finally sweeps over everyone to create a wonderfully dynamic scene of black humoured farce.

But this is, after all, The Sea - and so the storm subsides, and normality and calm is again restored. Memories disappear like sandcastles on a beach at high tide, and once more people pick up their guises of respectability and decorum. And as Evens stresses in the final scene, life goes on. Even after destruction, life continues and begins anew.

The Sea is a unpredictable mix of drama, comedy, farce and philosophy, and the strength of this production is that it allows all of these elements to be realised by the audience. A thought provoking evening, and highly recommended.

by Alison Yates