Tightrope Theatre present Cold Water, an insightful new production coming to Park Theatre this May. Interweaving extracts from Chekhov’s The Seagull, this intimate and honest production focuses on longing, regret, and the cocktail of fear and overconfidence when first graduating and stepping out into the real world.
Cold Water is a funny and moving new play about wanting things so much you can’t do anything about them. Following the intimate friendship of Emma, who dreams of being an actor and has recently moved back in with her parents and Matt, who previously worked in the creative industries and is now a full-time teacher, this gripping new play explores themes of ambition and what really drives us.
Playing the role of Matt will be seasoned stage actor, Jolyon Coy (I Joan, The Globe; Peaky Blinders, BBC) alongside Julia Pilkington (Cowboys & Lesbians, Park Theatre; Move Fast and Break Things, Summerhall) as Emma.
Since starting her new job as a teaching assistant in the Drama department of her old secondary school, Emma finds herself slowly starting to spend more and more time in the studio with Matt, her boss. Matt is teetering on the edge of having a baby and becoming a serious grown-up. He decides to teach her everything he knows, and Emma feels her life starting to change.
Cold Water is presented as part of Make Mine a Double, an exciting new programme presenting double bills of shows that aims to give theatre makers a lower-cost and lower-risk way of producing new work in the Finsbury Park venue, as well as offering multi-buy tickets to encourage local audiences to see compelling new work. Cold Water will play alongside Sniff (14th May – 24th May), in which two strangers meet in a pub toilet in a small town that no one cares about. Liam, struggling with addiction and money troubles, and Alex, cloaked in a Hugo Boss suit and the pride of a job in Canary Wharf. However, as the door locks, and time clocks, a dark connection begins to unearth itself.
Writer and director Philippa Lawford comments, Having grown up in Harpenden, this play is partly based on my experiences of being frustrated to not live in London, and feelings of awkwardness and embarrassment around pursuing dreams of working in theatre. Cold Water features extracts which I have adapted from Chekhov’s The Seagull, that contains many parallel stories of infatuation, longing, self- hatred and fear. I would describe Cold Water as a love story, albeit not a very successful one.
