Balisong

One chair has fallen over, three are stacked, and there is a fourth person who will never sit in any of them. Finn Ritchie is the absent boy at the centre of Balisong, reconstructed by the three friends who remain. “At least we knew we’d never lose him,” they say. Balisong spends its time trying to make him present.

William Alexander, Evie Mortimer and Kathryn Scott are an impressively drilled trio, passing the story between them without a seam. But as the trio conjure Finn, they almost disappear themselves. I got the entire way through without knowing a single one of their character’s names. Perhaps that doesn’t matter? But that’s rather my point: they draw themselves as a one rather than as a three, and that feels somehow odd in a play about the choices made between friends, and the effects of a tragedy on individuals. And so the absent fourth becomes more vivid than the three people left on stage.

The balisong itself changes shape constantly. It is at once a knife, a butterfly, a bird, a cage, or something that might be sewn back together. Elsewhere, a zombie game turns the idea of becoming untouchable into another little lesson: “And after that nobody bothers you. They see you and run.” The metaphor is clear, perhaps too clear. You can feel the piece being built for a school audience, with its images and games nudged towards their meaning before they have a chance to unsettle.

But the play has spent so much time telling us about Finn that there is surprisingly little left for the three who remain. The ensemble is slick, the message is clear, the knife is impossible to ignore. What is harder to find is the messy individuality of the people who have to live with it. And when the play finally allows some uncertainty to creep in - whether or not Finn is truly dead - it is frustratingly late. I left feeling as though I had been waiting for a second act that never came, not because Balisong needed to be longer than its 40-some minutes, but because it had only just reached the point at which its own unanswered questions might have begun to matter.

Balisong by Strange Town.