Credit: This Noise
Reviewer: Daniel Shipman
Upstaged Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
No One is Coming to Save You is a dark, strange and yet quietly hopeful piece of theatre. It covers one night as experienced by two insomniacs, exploring the unaccountable way that our thoughts behave when we should be asleep but can’t quite seem to get there.
Staged by fledgling theatre company This Noise, the show is performed with surprising charisma by Agatha Elwes and Rudolphe Mdlongwa. Their innate watchability takes an already intriguing script (written by Nathan Ellis) and turns it in to a fascinating thing to watch and listen to. The majority of the show takes the form of two interspersed monologues which aren’t in direct conversation with each other. However, the text is littered with subtle and satisfying echoes of itself.
The staging (Khadija Raza and Alice Simonato) is almost spartan in its simplicity, but this only serves to heighten the sense of existing in a void which might strike those who are awake when the rest of the world is asleep. Similarly, the sound design (Callum Wyles) captures a sense of lingering, non-specific dread without ever imposing itself upon the script or the performance.
The hallucinatory nature of the piece will not be to everyone’s taste, nor will the thoughts of random violence which occasionally pass through the characters heads. However, all of this will strike a chord with anyone who has ever spent sleepless nights with only their own mind for company and been surprised at what they have found there.
-Daniel Shipman