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An Orkney Hearth - Love and Other Ports Book one by Sara Romera #Review

  An Orkney Hearth – Love and Other Ports Book One   She has spent fifteen years learning how to need no one. Nora Sterling is the Cruise Director of the Vesta. She runs a department of a hundred, remembers nine hundred guests by name, and can talk a shipful of frightened people through a mid-ocean helicopter evacuation without once raising her voice.   She has no address. She has never slept on a mattress that was not somebody else's first. She has spent her entire adult life at sea and she has been perfectly, deliberately fine.   Then the ship takes on a new Music Director. Erland Isbister is Orcadian, unhurried, and quietly immovable. He does not perform, he does not push, and he notices everything. He also reports directly to her, which puts him squarely on the wrong side of the company handbook and squarely in her path ten hours a day, months at a stretch.   On a ship, there is nowhere to put a thing like this.   Nora has spent her whole ...
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Play: Pomona by Alistair McDowell




Play: Pomona by Alistair McDowell

Performed at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester and directed by Ned Bennett



Pomona is a bleak and uncompromising look at life. It is a dystopian thriller set in the inhospitable  landscape of Pomona: an empty strip of wasteland which lies between Salford and Manchester. It is a black hole at the centre of the city.  The play centres on the search for lost people, who have disappeared or lost themselves, somewhere in the city. Pomona seems to be an area which is ignored no matter how unsavoury the events there might be.

The staging is as bleak as the story, with a metal grid at its centre. The action takes place in a series of staccato scenes, punctuated with blackness. They seem harsh and unconnected. The effect on the viewer is unsettling and jarring, like the story. There are numerous time lapses in the course of the action. My thought at the end of the play was that the narrative had been like a double helix, twisting from past to present and back again. As the M60 circled the city so the story line seemed to run on without a conclusion, looping back onto itself.

Throughout the play, some characters are playing a role playing game. It is difficult to know what is real and what is just part of the game. It is unclear whether the whole play is in fact one huge game.  Open to interpretation, it strikes one that each viewer will see a different play. Some may take it at face value that there are two twin sisters who are searching for each other, as I did. Others may think that there is only one girl.

In short: a unsettling  play which journeys to a vacuum at the centre of everyday life where unspeakable deeds are ignored  and disregarded.


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