Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

Cast: Joe Shipman, Nina Yndis, Lucas Smith.

Musicians: Lizzie Nunnery, Martin Heslop, Vidar Norheim.

In many ways the war in Norway has been pretty much forgotten by many in the U.K. and beyond. The thought these days seems to centre on the fields of France, the systematic destruction of Eastern Europe and the polarised viewpoints of the war in the Far East. Yet Norway and especially for her citizens, the uneasy liaisons that lay between opposing Nazi rule and the fraternisation that reigned in the hearts of her young women starved of male attention and the deaths of so many her young men has somehow been cleansed, sanitised and thrown into the same realms of forgetfulness as those faced by the Channel Islands.

To take this idea on and couple it with the war in the North Sea, the freezing conditions faced by many a British sailor and the sheer loneliness faced by many in the dark is something that many might shy away from. However, in Liverpool’s Lizzie Nunnery, not only is there a writer who is capable of framing the stark naked reality faced by the confined sailors and the frustrations of a people left behind to fend for themselves during Nazi occupation, but one who can make every movement within the play feel as though it is subjected to the feeling of cramped tension, of compressed emotions which tangle as the war restricts the thought of opening up to someone in case they should perish and their soul abandoned.

Narvick sees British sailor Jim Callaghan, played with absolute conviction by Joe Shipman, see his life during those dark endless days and nights and the ghosts of misfortune plague him as he stumbles as an old man, limited by his own age and ability to look after himself and the squeezing of Time that he has remaining to him. It is this feeling of being confined to your own thoughts that install such bravery into Ms. Nunnery’s work, the scope of endeavour that makes Narvick an excellent piece of work to be part of an audience for.

Release is one in which we all hope for, our past, our present and the sad realisation that at some point in the future we shall relive our deepest worries and experiences again as the ghosts of our own imagination circle and pick at what is left to devour.

For Lizzie Nunnery, Narvick easily stands side by side with her stunning The Swallowing Dark, a play of great importance and dedication to the story, a skilful piece of artistic undertaking.

Ian D. Hall