As apart of The Pool Short Story Week
Listen to the podcast, or read the story below…
Mayday
Ten days later, the package finally comes. It is a small, brown, padded envelope, her name and address typed on a white label. The postmark is the Netherlands. Inside is a blister pack of tablets, one round and four ovals. No instructions, no warnings, and nothing to identify the sender. She pops out the round tablet there and then, in the hallway, and tries to swallow it down, but her mouth is too dry. She feels it stuck at the back of her throat. She makes it into the kitchen and pours a pint glass of water, drinks the whole thing down. The glass has a dried scum of lace at its neck and the water tastes stale. She can still feel the sensation of the tablet, lodged. There was a fresher, … Read more
“More than 100 years later, the three sisters are still stuck, but in Lucy Caldwell’s admirably free-handed adaptation of Chekhov’s play for the Lyric, the siblings are now mired as much in 1990s Belfast as they are in a particular point in history. In Selina Cartmell’s fluid production a fresh and uneasy peace is still stalked by soldiers, and army brats Orla, Marianne and Erin stand between a past they would rather forget and a future that has no obvious accommodation for them. Some cruelties are amplified (the sisters, defending their territory from a Chinese sister-in-law, are now flat-out racist), some subtleties are lost (the manner of the telling is unnecessarily forced), but Caldwell’s elegiac take on people in transition is absorbing and affecting, squinting uncertainly towards what is yet to come.”
