Sailing On

Public toilets are not pleasant places to be. The fact is, you can only sustain that half-breathing which prevents you from actually inhaling the environment for so long before asphyxiation sets in. It therefore doesn't take long for the audience of Sailing On to start questioning quite why they are standing in the ladies' loos at the New Town Theatre, listening to two women engage in droll banter behind closed cubicle doors.

Eventually the women introduce themselves, and we realise we are actually lucky to be in the presence of two female icons, Virginia Woolf and Ophelia - both missing, presumed drowned. Together they explain their mission to help a frequent visitor, Romola, recover from her own grief by transforming the toilet cubicles into the soggy site of her devastation.

Sailing On demonstrates ShadyJane's imaginative use of projection, reflection and sound to invoke the seaside location and thus tell its thin tale. Yet a slightly more selective and reliable use of these elements would have had more impact than the deluge of multimedia which actually occurred.

The real problem is that this trickery comes at the expense of story and character. Woolf and Ophelia are reduced to bickering, air-headed gossips, devoid of the slightest hint of the questions that the lives and deaths of these enigmatic women provoke. Romola's own brief monologue is wrought with emotion, but didn't require smudged mascara to get its point across.

A site-specific production is not an end in itself. On a Fringe where no space is safe from theatre companies looking for their latest gimmick, the genre only works when the location enhances the drama - the two elements working together to become more than a sum of their parts. However, as the cast splashed about in the sinks, it became apparent that Sailing On has little to say. Without a story or character about which to care, the novelty factor of watching three bedraggled women in a bathroom mirror runs dry.