Breaker

Every place has stories and myths connected to the land. The isolated island of Salka Gudmundsdottir’s mysterious two-hander, translated into English by Graeme Maley, is a place haunted by a fairytale that has proved chillingly prophetic. Or at least that’s how it seems to outsider Daniel, visiting the island in search of his grandmother’s past and hoping at the same time to piece together a narrative that might explain a recent local tragedy.

Gudmundsdottir’s central concern is the telling of stories and the very human desire—represented by yarn-spinning Daniel—to slot disparate events into a linear plotline. But for a piece asking questions of how we create narratives, Breaker’s own plot structure is surprisingly straightforward. It plays out through an exchange between Daniel and local woman Sunna, a teacher at the island school. Unlike Daniel, she is not convinced by stories, insisting that “there is no bigger picture”.

What follows is theatre as debate, shoving arguments and plot turns in the increasingly shouty mouths of the two characters. The oppositional dimension to this relationship feels implausibly overstated, quickly straying into unnecessarily personal territory in an attempt to drive things forward, while the balance of concealment and revelation often feels clumsy. At one moment the mood is startlingly confessional, in the next fiercely guarded.

The writing offers tantalising hints of lyricism, while performers Iain Robertson and Isabelle Joss finds moments of emotional tenderness in the exchange between Daniel and Sunna, but ultimately this play about stories is let down by its own faltering narrative.