Bridge to an Island[author-post-rating] (1/5 stars)

An angry young woman is spending New Year’s Eve alone for unspecified, but presumably quite miserable, reasons. She’s oddly misanthropic when it comes to real people, but loves characters in books and the ones she’s made up herself, which is probably the reason she’s mumbling Auld Lang Syne at her notepad tonight instead of at other human beings. In this series of vignettes by Out of the Trunk Theatre Company, the nameless girl, played by Rosanna Wood, is content to live in a world of imagination – but all of the stories she’s writing keep turning on her and having sad endings against her will.

A bigger problem for the structure of the show, if not for the Girl, is that her imagination is far too under-developed to be inhabitable. The main characters in her stories are frequently pretty much like her: other posh and lonely girls. There’s Clara, who seeks solace from the school she hates in an imaginary friend, or Aida, whose loving parents mysteriously disappear one evening. For a story that’s about the desire to live inside one’s mind, every single story occurs in a curiously flat mental plane, low on detail and populated by unrealistic characters who stand round spouting platitudes at one another.

When these characters aren’t other young girls, they are usually pairs of lovers played by the other two performers, Ross Kernahan and company Co-Artistic Director Annabelle Sacher. Multi-roleing takes real skill, to effectively separate and define each character, but Kernahan and Sacher make little more than a cursory attempt at doing this, with a limited array of accents and physicality seen in a range of characters. Inevitably they all merge into one, a meaningless blur, a relentless parade of hats and bad accents, dogged by static direction.

Little happens on stage, which is indicative, perhaps, of the problem of having a writer-director who also appears in the production. The action is awkward and repetitive: people enter, stand still and chat before just leaving again; after each story ends, Wood angrily tears up the paper she wrote it on. This doesn’t happen in a way that feels stylised or deliberately cumulative so much as uninventive.

It’s also worth noting that although the stories jump around in time and are curiously weighted towards the First World War, there’s no clear sense of historical interest or any sign of research having been carried out. For instance, one of the only things we hear said about WWI is that they thought it would be “over by Christmas” – not a particularly original insight.

Although the performances show odd moments of promise, barely one note of the whole show rings quite true. In perhaps the most uncomfortable sequence, two parents who have lost a child bump into each other on a bench and have a sort of, “Jonny is that you? It’s me, Irene…”-style exchange. As if you wouldn’t know at a glance, wouldn’t sense in an instant the person you lived with, loved, raised a child with, suffered with in such a profound way – as if you wouldn’t recognise this person with your very soul, just because they happened to be wearing an unusual hat.

Meandering and self-indulgent, Bridge to an Island displays not only an unfamiliarity but an inexcusable disinterest in both humanity and the human condition. It’s simply hard, by the end, to see what the point is.

Bridge to an Island can be seen at 14.15 at C Nova, every day until 26 August. For more information and tickets, visit the Edinburgh Fringe website.