Review: Collateral Damage, theSpace @ Surgeons Hall

As gritty kitchen sink dramas go, Without Compromise Theatre‘s Collateral Damage certainly fits the bill. We have fractured families containing an alcoholic mum, a fresh out of prison daughter, a child lost at a young age, and finally the one sister who may or may not be holding it all together. But what might not be quite present is enough depth to elevate the story above all the other kitchen sink dramas, while issues with the plotting leave a few too many questions that require answering.

The play sees Hayley (Charley Crooks) doing her best to heal the rifts between her mum Stacey (Lorna McFarlane) and sister Alex (Erin Clark). Alex has just been released from prison and staying with Hayley. Alex is estranged from both her mum and her own daughter who her ex-partner is refusing to allow her to speak to. In the middle of all this is Hayley, doing her best to bring some peace to proceedings, while having to deal with her own life stresses. The trio bring the required grit to proceedings. Clark’s Alex especially delivers a great performance as she tackles the complexity of being both a mother and daughter, and yet having to fight to save both relationships; even if she is adamant that only one of those relationships is worth saving. It will come as no surprise there is a lot of screaming and shouting going on, and a lot of drip feeding what brought them all to this impasse; a dead dad and childhood trauma certainly come into the mix quite heavily.

There is no doubting that Collateral Damage wants to address how trauma can affect people differently; for Stacey it means turning to the bottle, for Alex it is lashing out in violence, whilst Hayley, the one who on the surface seems fine, simply hides it all and pretends nothing is wrong.  The play does well to represent the damage caused by not talking, and yet frustratingly seems to then want to wrap it all up neatly after a quick counselling session for the warring trio. It feels as if the real story only starts to come alive when they agree to counselling, that it is a shame that this is only right at the end and at that point it is then oversimplified. Perhaps large parts of the lead up to this point could be cut, to give us more of the deeper inspection of how these three may slowly be putting their lives back together. 

Plotting issues don’t help either. As much as we’re made to feel Hayley is the one fighting to keep the family together, it seems she hasn’t actually seen her mother for a long time, and it is in fact Alex who seems to know more about what is happening in her mum’s life; even though Alex has been in prison and her mum has never visited. It’s these little inconsistencies that mean it struggles to paint a fuller picture. 

This is the second play around family conflicts and a sibling freshly released from prison that I’ve watched in Edinburgh. In seeing two very similar stories, the same point can be aimed at both; what makes each stand out in a crowded field? At the moment, the answer is not quite enough.

Written by Michael Johnson
Directed by Lucy Pedersen
Sound & Prop Design by Loz Thom
Lighting & Set Design by Danny Menzie
Produced by Without Compromise Theatre

Collateral Damage has completed its run at EdFringe