★★★★★ - Review by Roviews
At the heart of Sublimation is a story that has been told countless times, but here it is boiled down to something beautifully simple: capitalism, survival, morality and the relationships we form when we need one another.
Within the first few minutes, I could tell I was going to be in for a really good show. The stage is deliberately sparse: a small factory, boxes stacked at the back, a table, a machine and a handful of plastic buckets. Nothing is there to distract you from the story.
Frank Murdocco plays Ethan, a gay, divorced man trying desperately to keep his merchandise-printing business afloat. The bills are mounting, work is scarce and the pressure is beginning to show.
It immediately took me back to when I worked in sales. When your figures are low and somebody finally gives you some business, you become incredibly grateful for it. Sometimes so grateful that you are willing to charge less than you normally would, bend a few rules, work long hours or go that little bit further simply because you desperately need the work.
That feeling for me and my experience is captured perfectly here. I'm sure I'm not alone?
A mysterious female customer begins placing increasingly substantial orders. At first, she’s simply a customer keeping the machines running. But gradually the orders become more politically uncomfortable for Ethan, and the play starts asking a much bigger question: how much of yourself are you prepared to compromise in order to survive?
What I particularly loved about Sublimation is the way it shows a relationship developing between two people who, on paper, perhaps shouldn’t have much in common at all.
People don’t necessarily become friends through huge dramatic moments. Often it happens through tiny, everyday exchanges. You talk. You joke. You unload a small story. You remember something they told you yesterday. You ask about their life. Favours are done. Gradually, almost without noticing, somebody who was once simply a customer becomes part of your working day. They become a friend.
Eventually you form that strange thing many of us recognise from jobs: a kind of daytime work family.
And that is beautifully observed here. The politics may divide these characters, but people are more complicated than their politics. They start to understand one another as human beings. I've got friends all over the political spectrum.
The relationship also works both ways. Ethan desperately needs the customer’s orders because they are helping to keep his company afloat, but you could equally argue that she needs him. He is supplying something she wants, reliably and increasingly at scale. Their dependency becomes mutual, which makes the moral questions of the play far more interesting than simply dividing everything into right and wrong.
The odd title itself is actually clever. Sublimation is the printing process being used to create these mugs, T-shirts, keyrings and other merchandise, but the word also feels perfectly suited to a story about transforming and redirecting uncomfortable feelings, beliefs and compromises into something we can live with.
I won’t spell out where the story goes because that would destroy much of the pleasure of watching it unfold. Even when you think you know what direction the play is heading in, it has the ability to shift beneath you.
Murdocco gives a wonderfully believable and controlled performance. Although this is essentially a solo show, the relationship feels completely alive, helped enormously by Maria Dizzia’s recorded performance as the mysterious customer. You quickly stop thinking about the mechanics of it and simply believe in the conversations taking place. Brilliant.
The writing is sharp, intelligent and, importantly, human. It could easily have become a blunt political piece in which the audience is told exactly what to think, but it is much more interesting than that. It understands that principles can feel very clear when you’re financially comfortable, but become far more complicated when the rent, wages and bills need paying.
That is where Sublimation really lands.
The acting is on point, the writing is excellent and the simplicity of the production allows the central relationship to do all the work. It takes enormous contemporary political divisions and reduces them to two people doing business together — and then asks what happens when commerce, friendship and conscience become impossible to separate.
For me, this is an absolute gem of a show: deceptively simple, beautifully observed and genuinely gripping.
Sublimation demonstrates that sometimes the most complicated political questions begin with something as ordinary as somebody placing an order. Definitely see this show, a brilliant piece of work.
