Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: David Warner, Susannah Harker, Lisa Bowerman, Nicholas Briggs, Lucy Gaskell, Susanne Proctor.
One of the great promises of any artistic production is that it can be described as timeless, that the emotion of the piece is found to be intense, that it goes beyond the sense of the abiding comfort and routine and finds a place where the balance between revolutionary and eternal are met with expectations fulfilled.
Time changes everything, even the script may undergo a facelift to placate the sentiment and pulse of the day, but art will always find a way to be innovative, radical, and in equal measure, actively established and traditional in the same breath. It is in this dichotomy of split time and effect that the Sapphire And Steel audio drama Water Like A Stone captures the existence and drive of human interaction with Time itself. To perform on stage in the present but to mouth the words written in a period so far in the past and by different voices is enough to give Time the ammunition it needs to feed, to cause havoc where it can.
If the play’s the thing, then Time and humanity are linked through the motion of memory, of framing a story which can bring emotional response to the soul that it causes a kind of feedback, an overwhelming of energy that crackles with life. For Sapphire And Steel, the play is all too real, and through them the listener is forced to confront their own memories of time when spent inside a theatre, the silent voyeur moved by circumstances they had not considered, emotionally seized by words from the past that resonate in the world they live in today.
With the tremendous Lisa Bowerman, a stalwart of the Big Finish range of audio dramas, included in the cast, and in the role of another elemental agent of Time, that of Ruby, and Nicholas Briggs providing an excellent turn as Arthur, Water Like A Stone is an admirable piece of theatre in itself, one that is respectful to the medium and to the progressive nature of audio dramas in the 21st Century.
Water, like the stage, has memory, it is in our best interests to make sure they never meet and corrupt Time to the point of destruction.
Ian D. Hall