Time Stands Still

Overview

Time Stands Still does not stop. It does not rest, it does not halt, nor does it falter. It is an animal of its own kind with no respite. It writhes, winks, slinks and blinks in your mind's eye, well beyond the night you saw it.

To bear witness is a difficult anomaly: to help the individual suffering in that moment or tell the world and perhaps change something?

When injured photojournalist Sarah Goodwin (Rebecca Rocheford Davies) returns to Brooklyn from the Iraq war to her home shared with de facto James (Richard Sydenham), her clipped sentences and heavy sighs and his pandering readiness reveal an all-too-apparent tension. The couple skirt around "the accident" while Sarah grimaces in pain, her face ripped with grazes like 'Diamond Face' in the Bond film, Die Another Day (props to the make-up team).

The visit of an old friend and photo editor, Richard Elrich (Noel Hodda) — not to mention the unannounced accompaniment of a sugar-coated twenty-something doll face, Mandy Bloom (Harriet Dyer) — has Sarah panicking. Mandy's hyper-conflated deliberations over why she bought both the 'Get Well Soon' and the Welcome Home' balloons because she couldn't decide between them leave Sarah's eyes simply burning. The meeting of their two worlds is like putting a chihuahua in front of a lion; it throws open the vast divide between the fluffy and trivial west and the pain and grit of the war-torn Middle East.

However, time rolls on and people change. How can we help the child dying in the street or the baby elephant cut lost from his mother? If we care too much about fixing the world, can we ever find joy? We don't know the answers, but everyone devises their own truths.

American actor Rebecca Rocheford Davies is also the producer who shared discussions of the Pulitzer Prize winner Donald Margulies' scripts with a meet-up group of engaged actors and writers. Once she came across Time Stands Still, she knew it had to be staged. Her rather apt cast choices were informed through watching actors perform, rather than audition, in a more natural sense rather than under pressure.

Time Stands Still is downright frank and complete. It resembles a film more than a play and has a way of engrossing you so that reducing it down to a 400-word abstraction proves problematic. The concerns raised are real, manifold and sprouting with questions upon questions. They don't stop.