A smile and a nod are all it takes. What else can you ask for when you walk into the theater and Andrew Scott is already standing on stage, greeting you? We locked eyes, and my heart stopped.
It was just him in a blue shirt, a half-drunk bottle of water, a few scattered chairs, and a wash of dim overhead light. The stage looked less like a set than a backstage area, bare and stripped down. It was just me and him — and the rest of the audience.
“Sea Wall” was born out of necessity. In 2008, London’s Bush Theatre flooded, and while the building was slowly being repaired, the Tony Award-winning playwright Simon Stephens was commissioned to write a play that could be performed in natural daylight. He wrote the monologue play for Scott, who has returned to the role of Alex several times since. Combined with the bare set, the show reminded me of Jerzy Grotowski’s theory of “poor theatre”: the belief that theater can survive, and even thrive, without elaborate sets, costumes, lighting, or music. Strip away everything non-essential, and theater is reduced to its absolute, irreducible core: the live, direct, and electric relationship between the actor and the spectator.
The show starts out lightweight. Everything feels casual, as if the protagonist — Alex, a photographer — were an old friend, retelling funny stories about his family. Someone once told him that “every novel is a detective novel,” an idea Alex finds so absurd he bursts into laughter: “DETECTIVE NOVEL? Jane Austen? Franz Kafka?!” As Scott looks out into the audience and delivers his amusing anecdotes, a cacophony of laughter follows — sometimes from the whole room, sometimes from one section, sometimes from a single person, whom Scott then acknowledged with a direct gesture.
With no lighting changes and no scene changes, Scott has only his body and voice to build the world of the show. The whole performance is narrated in the first person, and the room itself becomes the set. When Alex mentions a window, his body and focus turn toward the actual window in the theater. When he describes a mountain or a particular subject, he lets us borrow his eyes: when he looks up into the far diagonal corner of the theater, I could feel how tall the mountain must be; when he gestures off to the side and talks about his father-in-law reading a book, I could almost picture the old man sitting there. There was no mountain and no beach on the stage, of course. But by the time Scott moved on, I could still clearly imagine both the peak rising somewhere above the ceiling and the old man relaxing by the water with a book in his hand.
Little by little, the picture is filled in. Alex explains what things are and what people are, and the groundwork for the tragedy is laid out clearly — down to a rock jutting out by the water. Scott brings the tragedy to life so vividly that I can almost see the blood on Alex’s hands as he gestures, feeling the weight of what he is carrying. Scott is retelling the story and reacting to it in the moment, all at once. Then I see Alex’s face: a mix of shock and overwhelm, as if a bomb has dropped, and he hasn’t yet had time to react. He is just stuck there, legs rooted to the ground.
I can’t recall the exact lines that came next. What I remember is a long, long silence. In that silence, Scott walked off the stage, and from somewhere beyond it came the faint sound of crying. After a while, he walked back on, his face buried in his hands.
It’s hard to describe exactly how that moment felt. It was as if a crack had been torn open in the story the play had woven, and through it I glimpsed a soul — whether Scott’s or Alex’s, I couldn’t tell. He wasn’t performing sadness for an audience. He looked like a man struggling to find words for something in his life that words cannot hold.
“Just because we don’t know doesn’t mean we won’t know,” Alex says as the play draws to a close. It never shows the aftermath of his grief. Instead, as the lights go down, I feel its full weight crashing onto me.
Looking around, the house was full of people in their thirties and forties, many in their sixties, seventies, and older, and even some younger faces like mine. That, too, was one of the things I found most beautiful about the night: strangers from every generation, sitting in the same room, laughing at the same jokes and holding their breath through the same silence. For 50 minutes, one man’s story belonged to all of us.
Notably, the production is being turned into a new feature film. The producers describe the project as “a film about the creation of theater”: director Tina Satter plans to film all nineteen performances for a feature that captures the whole life of the event — backstage, on stage, and out in the house. Each night’s audience, including the one I sat in, is treated as an essential character in the film, which will be released at a later date.
“Sea Wall” is running at Studio Seaview in New York for nineteen performances only, with the final show on Oct. 30, and several performances have already sold out. If you’ve been a fan of Andrew Scott, love a good one-man show, or are drawn to explorations of grief and life, this is definitely a performance you shouldn’t miss.
