Review: SCAPE, Colab Tower, Tunnel 1

The Side/Step Festival seeks out untraditional venues in which to perform, and it’s then perfectly understandable that, as part of it, we find ourselves in a long, dark tunnel at Colab Tower, where SCAPE, written by Kyndall Sillanpaa, is performed.

Sophie Vincent plays an adult Kyndall, who plays VHS tapes from her childhood to maintain a contact with her father, who has passed away. It soon becomes apparent, however, that her father’s spirit has inhabited the tapes and is communicating with his daughter through them. 

Written and directed by Kyndall Sillanpaa, SCAPE is an interesting exploration of grief and how we might progress in life after losing a parent. It examines the need to connect with those who have gone, reclaiming past moments from childhood and coming to terms with the responsibilities of adulthood. There’s insightful commentary on the tangential family relationships that alter once a parent is no longer in the equation – particularly when one sibling is still in contact with them. Vincent gives a really solid performance as Kyndall, neatly hitting her emotional highs and lows and giving clarity to the troubled thinking the character undergoes. 

Clearly, lots of work has been put into the visuals, with a series of home movies edited to extract moments of speech and restructure them to create new conversations. The video work feels edgy, but it’s also charming at times, and for the most part works really well. Captions on the screen are helpful when trying to decipher the dialogue through the slightly rough home video sound.

The tunnel venue is both good and bad for this play. It’s eerily creepy and works brilliantly in setting up an atmosphere where the supernatural can play out. With the audience lined along two walls and the performance taking place along the centre, a TV screen at one end presents the movies, glaring in beautiful technicolour in the darkness and occasionally glitching in a disquieting manner. Flickering lights additionally contribute to a thoroughly unsettling atmosphere. Where things become difficult is in trying to watch both Vincent and the screen – which is effectively another character – at opposite ends of the tunnel. It’s a bit like tennis, and you have to be quick to flick your neck round and catch the televised images and captions before they’ve passed on to the next.

That being said, Sillanpaa’s direction does an admirable job within the space, keeping it active by having Vincent constantly shifting props, switching lamps on and off, all the while conversing with the character of her father in a precise, choreographed interaction. 

Come the end, it feels like there could be more intensity to the conclusion. The show seemed to finish a little abruptly – and it’s not overly long as it is, with what seemed to be a 50-minute running time. There’s certainly room here for a bit more of a twist, but SCAPE is nonetheless a play with lots of potential. Perhaps with a little more work on a punchy ending, it might find its way to a forthcoming GrimFest…

Co-creator, Writer & Director: Kyndall Sillanpaa
Co-creator: Sophie Vincent

SCAPE has completed its run as part of the Side/Step Festival