The title, like everything else in Sasha Ranawake's deeply personal yet universal new play, means several things at once. Completely Bloody Incoherent initially seems an apt description of a structure that jumps between two 'actors' and two other people (one of whom is also an actor - but then, aren't they all?) without explaining how these couples relate to each other. But the apparent confusion is part of the design. By the time the title's accusation returns at the end of the show, everything has fallen into place. In condemning her own work as incoherent, Ranawake demonstrates just how remarkably coherent it really is. In fact, it's one of the most persuasive meditations on the meaning of art you're likely to see all year.
And if meditations on the meaning of art sound like your idea of a heavy night at the theatre, once again Ranawake is five steps ahead. This play addresses those deep questions, isn't afraid to stray into the pretentious territory of late-night conversations that no amount of cheese on toast can dilute, but it's always done with tongue firmly in cheek. Every time one character talks of how inspired she is by Brecht's use of fourth-wall signposting, there's another ready and waiting to cut her down to size.
Usually I'd say you can't have your cake and eat it too. But Completely Bloody Incoherent is one of those rare cases when you can. It is an honest/artificial, delicate/robust, maddening/satisfying examination of what it means to create. And, like a DPhil mathematician's equation that fills an entire wall with complex squiggles and ideas, the answer is, and always was, simply x.
Hope Healy plays Dahlia, a playwright trapped between her desire to write truth and her urge to avoid it. Ollie Gillam is her actor boyfriend Luke, whose fruitless search for roles reflects his own lack of confidence in his identity. From meet-cute to messy break-up, their relationship gives the play a vital backbone to cling to.
Meanwhile, Coco Scanlon and Seb Foster play Actor 1 and Actor 2. Their scenes together seem at first to be a separate story, but gradually it becomes clear that they are acting out extracts, audition pieces, even sections from Dahlia's own work. In one moment of magnificent meta-theatrical indulgence, Scanlon delivers the same scene several times, cut up like a jigsaw puzzle, as she tries to find the 'truth' of her character. In another, Foster talks along to a scene from Inception, faking drama through the most hollow of Hollywood pseudo-intellectualism.
It all comes to a head when these two pairs of parallel lives meet, and we see an entirely new, and courageously revealing, side of Dahlia's character. But you'll have to buy a ticket to find out what that is. What I can reveal is that all four performers navigate the waters between honesty, deception, performance and reality with unerring accuracy and clarity. Healy and Gillam, while winding each other up, wind the audience round their little fingers.
Like Ranawake's last play, The Players, Completely Bloody Incoherent looks at the business of theatre with a fresh, reality-bending eye. But where The Players made a point of separating backstage shenanigans from performance itself, this play asks where one begins and the other ends. Each scene is separated by a sound which resembles an old audio tape player being fast-forwarded or reversed, and the 'play' button being pressed. And that makes sense: every live show you see, for all its apparent spontaneity in performance, is no more than an artificial rerun of last night's show. It's the final, complex twist on a kaleidoscopic evening of funny, serious, and ultimately pure, theatre.