The warmth of Out Of Water

Sometimes theatre reaches into your body, pulls out your soul and puts it on stage. That’s what Orange Tree Theatre's Out Of Water did for me. (It’s why I saw it three times.)

The day before I first saw it, I came out to a couple of colleagues. No matter how many times you do it, that tiny niggle of fear never quite goes away. Will they treat me differently? A split-second decision to not come out at work is the crux of this play, which sees pregnant Londoner Claire, played movingly by Lucy Briggs-Owen, move up to South Shields, her wife Kit’s hometown, and start working with Pupil Premium students at the deprived school Kit went to.

By using storytelling as a framing device, playwright Zoe Cooper emphasises how stories – and perhaps therefore plays themselves – can function as action in the quest for LGBTQ+ equality, with the word ‘do’ echoing throughout. The naturalistic dialogue creates jarring mid-sentence repetition, and a stuttery, juddery sense that the characters are self-editing in a bid to get the story right – just as they interrupt one another to point out what they have neglected to mention. A tale will vary with the teller, and the time, as police officer Kit (Zoe West) acknowledges when she tells her old school of how she grew up queer in the North-East.

Yet it is the action of Claire’s non-binary student Fish (Tilda Wickham), who loves wild swimming and believes the evolutionary theory of the aquatic ape is key to their own gender identity, which is the great change-maker here. Claire tells Fish their school project is about how they ‘imagine’ themself swimming in the sea – a mere story – but by the end the more assured Kit has acknowledged that they ‘actually’ do swim. They have taken the plunge to live as themself.

Designer Camilla Clarke does a superlative job of transporting the audience into the classroom, with plastic chairs for the front row, parquet floors and the prefab’s ladder, which later cleverly serves as a hospital bed. Director Guy Jones also utilises the in-the-round space (the most intimate theatre in London, in my view) wonderfully, as the cast, who take on the secondary roles, too, pace the floor to look at those watching them. Zoe West’s connection with the audience is particularly remarkable, and her portrayals of gruff teacher Brendan and bored student Dylan are highlights – though I would have loved to hear more of Kit’s story (a prequel, then sequel, please Zoe Cooper?). 

Tilda Wickham also swaps between characters, including a ‘roundy and reassuring’ nurse and head teacher Judith, with impressive ease, and at the end of Act Two, as the trio talk between themselves (almost at cross-purposes), it’s impossible to take your eyes off them. 

The strongest moments are those where gentle humour is mixed with tension: the toothless old couple sucking on crisps in the hospital, watching as Claire and Kit have a row. The ‘wine mum’ drunk at her daughter’s second birthday party, surrounded by sober dancers, who reinforces old-fashioned views. Or the silence as Claire attempts ‘active listening’ on her students, to hear their own tales. 

But this play is not just about the stories we tell others – it is also about the stories we tell ourselves. Cooper excels in presenting the fine line queer families tread when it comes to what society deems ‘normality’, starting with the knowing abnormality scan, where a nurse reassures them that ‘everything is all completely, completely normal’ with the pregnancy – even their ‘unusual’ desire to not know the sex of their baby, later referred to as ‘they’ (in keeping with Fish). It’s refreshing in this age of pink-or-blue gender reveal parties.

When the lies Claire has told about who she is come to a head, Kit, surrounded by a set that has crumbled around her, the floor (and facade) falling away, declares: ‘I don’t know how we do this if we aren’t just pretending to be like everyone else.’ Society doesn’t provide queer families with a blueprint in the same way it does for heterosexual couples. But this play proves that progress is possible, no matter how slow. Nothing sums it up better than the near-closing statement: ‘How it takes months’ to warm the sea up, and ‘how this might take. If we let it. Years maybe. Perhaps a generation. To feel that warmth’.

I’d never claim a play is perfect. Claire’s symbolic dream, in which she is a pregnant salmon (how very Freudian), is slightly underdeveloped, while the soundbites of David Attenborough nature documentaries mimed by Fish feel heavy-handed at points – I much prefer the folky sea shanties composed by Helen Skiera, and sung beautifully by Wickham and West. But, with queer theatre especially, what matters most is feeling that warmth. Out Of Water lets me feel it in a way no other play ever has.