Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7.5/10

Cast: Helen Foster

To explore, it is a fundamental part of humanity, that need to stretch out and find new lands, to discover fresh ways of achieving, to be the first to see something or experience new depths is what drives us. However with each passing moment the limits that we can go to are not just tested, they are slimmed down as more and more rules are imposed and limitations are set down, it takes sheer bloody mindedness to go beyond what is expected and those that do should be congratulated for doing so.

For Helen Foster’s The Diver is more than just a fresh new piece of theatre being offered out for consumption and then to perhaps add to the list of pieces seen, it is a chance to see into the psyche of the actor as a symbolic piece of art, one in which tests the waters of new writing and how far such pieces are represented. In this, Helen Foster is to be congratulated for bringing home to the 81 Renshaw Street audience a new and well mapped out story that, whilst needing consideration for the future, is more than enough to have a crowd believing in the ability of an actor to suspend belief and to engage with them on different levels.

Helen Foster brings the story of Kate Plank, a young adventurer who has scaled Everest, braved the Antarctic and been so full of derring-do that she puts Ranulph Fiennes to shame, there is nothing she hasn’t tried but yet that sense of achievement is nothing as she finds, as in life that there are only so many things you can do on your own before loneliness becomes sacrosanct. With the only thing left to do that means anything, Kate Plank sets out to become the first person to walk underwater from Land’s End To New York, but what are the real reasons for her adventure?

Comedy with pathos is a hard mistress to appease, it can take years before one comes along with the sense of direction needed to guide it, in some small quarter, Helen Foster has achieved this with The Diver. It is the sadness, the near tragic of solo experiences that brings the comedy out and becomes something with huge and solid potential.

A good night out in a creative space that deserves nothing but good fortune.

Ian D. Hall