My Eyes Went Dark

Writer/director Matthew Wilkinson’s epic drama, which examines the stages of mourning and trauma after a man’s wife and children are killed in a plane crash, spans several years and features quite a considerable cast of characters, but is all neatly contained within a deftly staged two-hander.

The play consists of a series of conversations between actors Cal MacAninch and Thusitha Jayasundera – he playing the bereaved Ossetian architect Nikolai Koslov in the aftermath of the accident, and she the people he encounters in his relentless quest for justice. Based on a real series of events, Koslov’s desire to enact some kind of revenge on the air traffic controller he holds responsible for the crash eventually involves opting to settle the dispute, let’s say, out of court.

It’s a fascinating and horrifying narrative that Wilkinson mines for its emotional and political potential. MacAninch is captivatingly tormented as the grief-stricken Koslov, and Jayasundera flits in and out of different characters with ease and conviction, always maintaining a fizzing chemistry with her scene partner in the different dynamics they portray – by turns fraught and tender.

The stripped-back staging—just two chairs stand in for the backdrops of fields, doorsteps, courtrooms and nightclubs—draws focus towards Koslov’s inner world, and Wilkinson plays on our sympathies by presenting him as an initially sympathetic character whose refusal to forgive, and inability to look outside of his own knee-jerk emotional response to events, slowly transforms him into an antihero of tragic proportions.