This review was originally written for The Reviews Hub
This inventive, whimsical play follows Maia on an infinite train of souls, blending absurd comedy, physical theatre, and light philosophical musings.
Maia, blindfolded and tied to a chair, pops awake. She comes alive. Or doesn’t. Because she’s dead. That’s not a spoiler – the conceit is barely hidden, although truculent Maia has yet to come to terms with the fact.
She’s on a train, but not alone. She has three sudden boon companions, a naïve and puckish trio who are quite content bumping along in the rear carriage and never questioning what might lie ahead. But Maia wants answers, so she must push forward, carriage by carriage, bringing her rude mechanicals along for the ride.
This is a very particular train, infinitely long and containing every soul that ever existed. But, as we find out along the way, it is the journey not the destination that matters. Each carriage contains another epiphany, another character, another teachable moment, as Maia (Soraya Pouilly) inches closer to self-knowledge.
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None of this episodic quest is burdened with a mission much beyond our mild amusement. Oliver Ellard’s script pokes around at philosophical questions about the meaning of life but the answers present themselves mostly in the spirit of the people she encounters. They are comically absurd. Life is comically absurd.
There’s the Grim Reaper on a laptop doing the filing. And a bumptious official handing out reincarnation application forms. Some of this is underpowered and frayed at the edges, but the whole is an emerging delight.
Knock-about fun
The promising Tellus Theatre collective – alumni from the East 15 Acting School – specialises in a kind of inventive, knock-about physical theatre. With Night Train, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is an obvious influence and, if Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern really are dead, they would likely choose this fatuous form of transport to carry them over.
Under the direction of Zoe Boyd, the piece has an impish charm, cheerfully captured by the performers – Leah Zhelyazkova, Noa Zatta, Mukti Murton, Anna Murton and Todd Hazeldine – who are chirpy and winning. The sinuous cavorting (choreographed by Zatta and Zhelyazkova) is deft and persuasive, at one point animating a multi-headed beast with a truly sinister slither.
The hour-long piece grows increasingly enchanting as the story progresses although it stumbles in pacing and tone when Maia meets bed-bound Leila in an over-worked quest for narrative resolution.
Better if the answers remain elusive. Better if we stay on the train, seeing what chaos greets us in the next carriage. That’s where the magic happens, hurtling along a railway track heading to, but never quite reaching, the undiscovered country.
Night Train ran at The Space, Isle of Dogs between 18-22 February 2025.