This is a bracingly odd 30-minute digital play which you want to see again the minute it ends, in hope to understand it better but also because this peculiar yet nailbiting tale is over too soon.
Written by Lulu Raczka and released for free on Halloween by Liminal Stage Productions (who combine live performance with emerging technologies), Grey Man starts off as a game of scary stories – or a series of stop-start tales told by one sister, Maya, about her older, absent one.
It is a monologue performed as a duologue, sometimes in split screen: Kate O’Flynn and Kristin Hutchinson, both excellent as Maya, each appear in rooms that are clearly the same but configured differently. One is clean and spare, the other lived-in but also discoloured, as if its walls are singed. Some of the stories Maya tells are urban myths that her sister told her, which all have a gimmicky twist at the end designed to make her skin crawl. But these combine with glimpses into the older sister’s life: a creepy boyfriend, her fear of the outside, her withdrawal from the world into a cupboard which resembles a coffin.
Sharply directed by Robyn Winfield-Smith with jumpy music composed by Max Pappenheim, the “grey man” – a modern yet mythic kind of bogeyman – is the production’s central, illusive, metaphor and it is both intriguing and frustrating that clear meanings are withheld.
Much is left inconclusive but this is partly what makes it so unsettling and memorable. We hear half-spoken depths in Maya’s words: guilt, grief and love, all conveyed through her storytelling game. There is a sense of parallel lives too by the end; one version of Maya carries on talking, as if trapped by her memories, while the other walks off the set, possibly liberated.
