Pipeline Theatre. Gallery Press reviews Audience reviews. Full press reviews Audience reviews. Ingenious, yes, but there's so much more to Spillikin. In fact, I would go as far as to say - Kneehigh's Tristan and Yseult excepted - this is the best play I've seen that's been written and produced in Cornwall.
Despite the AI factor, this is an incredibly human story and one that is brilliantly written, acted and designed. Sally is suffering from Alzheimer's, she thinks "brainiac" husband Raymond is away at a robotics conference. But he's dead. Spillikin opens with one of his colleagues from "the department" installing a robot in her home, where the unseen carer with the fat arms sees to her everyday needs. It soon becomes apparent that the robot is an extension of her husband; a different kind of carer who gently provokes memories and language to aid her memory.
Raymond has succumbed to a terminal condition, which started off with him spilling things but led to a slow death in a wheelchair; he had become the spillikin of the title. Sally was equally in thrall to him and frustrated by what he had become; a "wanker" in her, often harsh, words. Their burgeoning love is told through Sally's fractured memory with remarkable, naturalistic performances by Hannah Stephens and Michael Tonkin-Jones as the young Sally and Raymond. Following brilliant turns in Pipeline's equally superb and moving Transports and Miracle's The Tempest, Stephens is surely destined for mighty things.
She has a gift for playing characters that are sassy and, Raymond's accusation here, "facetious" but all the time showing their vulnerability.
She is a mesmerising force. Their performances, coupled with a humorous and realistically profane script by Jon Welch, make their blossoming tale of awkward young love the most engaging relationship I've ever seen in a Cornish production. But let's not forget Judy Norman as the older Sally, her nuanced performance from rage and confusion to childlike adoration and wistfulness is stunning. Her final scene as she emerges wizened, shaking and barely able to speak is heartbreaking - I had to look away.
