REVIEW: The World Is Falling In Around Us
Review Date: 27th May @ The Union Theatre
REVIEWS
L Song
5/28/20262 min read
©️ Photo by TDD Studio
The World Is Falling In Around Us is a small play about a very large feeling: the moment when ordinary life becomes impossible to carry. In just 45 minutes, it captures the quiet violence of repetitive work, pressure, and isolation. The world is not falling apart through one great disaster, but through alarms that cannot be answered, complaints that go nowhere, and people who are expected to keep functioning long after they have run out of strength.
The play follows the life of two neighbours who barely know one another. Grace (by Tumba Katanda) is trapped in an HR job she hates until one missed morning begins a painful chain of dismissal, failed interviews and eviction. Jo (by Julie Coleman) appears more stable with an accountancy job, but her life is shaped by workplace harassment and the anger she has no safe place to express. Katanda gives Grace a raw energy of frustration, while Coleman brings a sharp tension to Jo. Together, they bring to the stage the disturbing pressure that many people may painfully recognise from their own daily life.
Written by Treasa Nealon and directed by Valerie Mo, the production keeps the focus tight and intimate. The central idea of two neighbours separated by thin walls could perhaps have been developed further as a theatrical device, but the play is more affecting when it turns inward, allowing its beautifully written monologues to guide the characters from isolation towards recognition. Grace and Jo did not connect through easy kindness. Their first real contact was hostile, even absurd. What brought them together was something sadder and more honest - the discovery that the other person is also barely surviving.
The ending note of the play brings that emotional force to its best. Drunk, desperate and briefly free, Grace and Jo danced and finally screamed together. It is not a solution to their lives, but for one moment, they did something they could not afford to do before - they made noise. In a society that keeps asking them to be quiet, useful and functional, that noise feels like a small act of defiance.
Overall, The World Is Falling In Around Us is a compassionate and sharply observed short play that shows us how shared hopelessness can become a form of community. And in the end, what remains is perhaps not a solution, but a moment of recognition, and the fragile comfort of not being alone in the noise.
★★★★
For more information, please visit: https://uniontheatre.biz/show/the-world-is-falling-in-around-us/
Credits:
Writer: Treasa Nealon
Director: Valerie Mo
Set Designer: Eizo Zhao
Sound Designer: Vyvyan Stewardson
Lighting Designer: Baysalt Gui
Assistant Director: Georgia Grace Gavin
Cast: Tumba Katanda, Julie Coleman
This play is part of One Act Festival at The Union Theatre, produced by Whim Theatre and Off Main Stage.
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