One Night Stand

 

The idea’s slim, a focused blast. A man on a beach recalls his past. It’s a typical tale, and full of woe, of love and life and where they go. Man meets girl, and takes her far: man loses girl and burns his car. Kai Fisher is enlisted to set the scene: a charming use of light and screen. Melody Grove and Nick Underwood enunciate the words, their acting good. Sam Rowe, fresh from Glasgay success, directs them well as they confess to love and desire, to pain and hope. This One Night Stand becomes a metaphysical trope for loss of youth and comfort disappeared. It’s less overtly sexual than I had feared.

The dream-like aura is mostly kept on-line by Fisher’s allusive set. He meets her at a traffic light: they drive around and spend the night. In the morning, she is gone: where now his hopes, his love so strong? The woman a dryad, her mournful tale lost in the man’s swaggering hale. Its poignancy could be worse, but direct meaning is lost within the idiosyncratic use of verse.