Reactor
This show closed days before the UK locked down in 2020. Which is key to what you read next.
Is living in isolation a ticking time bomb? Are we more connected with an audience than ever, and yet all the more alone for it? Are each of us just like a nuclear reactor, waiting to melt down?
Written and performed by Ewan Pollitt in every role, Reactor was a show about radiation poisoning, workplace burnout, and teetering on the edge of a rock face in the Lake District.
Fun facts about this show:
The tone was paranoid by design. Then the day we opened, murmurs about a national lockdown began to circulate. Hmm.
This began as a 10-minute work-in-progress we did for fun. Then, the Drayton Arms offered us a run at their theatre. “Put on any show you want”. Just three weeks later, this full-length version of Reactor opened there.
Ewan based this story on his brother, who really does work in a nuclear reactor.
Stray cats feature a lot in the show, because cats often wander nuclear reactors due to the warmth underfoot. Aw.
We sort of saw Reactor as the anti-Chernobyl. If Chernobyl was a huge-scale production about a government in moral freefall, this was just about one man dragged kicking and screaming into bettering himself.