A Solitary Choice

Overview

Recently returned from a run at the Edinburgh Fringe, the Seymour Centre's one-woman A Solitary Choice stars Tamara Lee as the sheep-contemplating Ruth. Ruth has a problem. In fact, Ruth has many problems — she has a husband lost in an interminable PhD, she's stuck working in the unsympathetic world of finance and is unexpectedly pregnant. The story of Ruth slowly discovering her child within is run in parallel to the story of her husband Christopher looking for unlikely pleasure in the world of real-estate and also running into his own inner tyke.

The set of the play is sparse. A bench, a chair, a table, a newspaper and a small, checked-green suitcase. Lee cuts Ruth and her world cleanly from these spare ingredients, creating places as easily with the set as her voice carves out silhouettes of Ruth's loved-ones. Lee's effervescent face and bell-like song are engaging, and she draws sympathy for Ruth's life and yearnings. But it's not a happy story. For Ruth, the world seems split into people living safe in boxes, and wilder creatures with the ferocity to live a harder life. Her fantasies are bleak dreams of far away places, welling-up into a torrent of words and joie de vivre bursting to escape into her day-to-day life.

The twin themes of choice and inevitability dominate Sheila Duncan's play. The author of the epic Sandman once said that the eight-year saga came down to a single decision its protagonist makes late in the piece. A Solitary Choice is also about a choice — ostensibly an abortion — but her decision comes down to something even more significant. Ruth is torn fiercely between her loves and her needs, and at the end of the play it's hard to tell whether she chooses the right things. But the path she takes to get there is persuasive and watching her is no mistake.