Wrecked

It’s not a complete car crash, but Wrecked is a long way from roadworthy. Fever Dream’s site-specific show takes place in a smashed-up saloon car. The bonnet’s crumpled; the headlights are smashed. Inside, slumped on the steering wheel, Sam sits up with a start: “Fuck!”

She has no recollection of what just happened – how she came to pile into this tree. Nor, more worryingly, has she any memory of who she is. Searching the cars for clues, she finds none; just a collection of poems and a travel coffee mug, the contents still warm. She hates coffee, though, and this lived-in seven-seater—“the old man of cars”—doesn’t much reflect a 27-year-old woman.

Gradually, it comes back: childhood memories, broken relationships, an intense, intoxicating friendship with a woman who puts her foot to the floor. In all of them, Sam’s running away – from home, from responsibility, from reality. Mostly, just from herself. Even this is a getaway car.

A monologue that might have worked on stage goes awry in this setting; too theatrical for so real a space. Watching via wing mirrors fragments Kirsty Bruce’s face, and Sam seems as shattered as her windscreen, but Wrecked never works out its audience’s role. Why is she chatting to strangers in the back seat? It’s a theatrical conceit, fine, but Sam doesn’t just talk to us, she monologues at us with OTT metaphors: kisses taste “like fire and eternity”; Sam “learns to be like the wind”. It all starts to feel like a write-off.