Theatre / “Fragments”, by Maura Pierlot. At The Street Theatre until September 27. Reviewed by ARNE SJOSTEDT

MONOLOGUE can be a great vehicle to explore themes, tell a story, even emotional experience, if that is what the playwright has set out to do. And this is the sort of play audiences will experience with “Fragments”. 

The play was deftly performed by a team of young adults, all of who delivered the script with confident and nuanced performances, cleverly presented by director Shelly Higgs. Working through each character’s story, viewers are invited into their individual world of anxiety, lack of confidence, social and family pressures, the impact of an all invasive and manipulative social media. 

Though some of the actors in the character’s life were new, as a work of theatre this didn’t tell a particularly new story. And the story it did tell seemed so focused on the negative experience of these individuals that it didn’t make for much of a fun night out. Being sledgehammered with how bad a person feels, and to have this on repeat for an hour and a half was taxing on the senses and I struggle to find the value in a work that serves primarily to show that mental health problems exist for young people, and to drag you through that experience without much relent. 

The show was well staged, and the performers moved cleverly, using props and set pieces intelligently to support the presentation. 

However, hungry to invoke pathos, there was no transformative message, no flipside to what is only a portion of the human conundrum, regardless of how important it might be to understand that not everybody is as happy or as attractive as they appear to be in their Instagram feed. Tellingly, I felt trapped in this world, and didn’t much like it. 

Creatively crafted, with beautiful pieces of dialogue, to some degree, you could see “Fragments” as a call to awareness, or action, for those who go through the experiences presented. 

But as a canvass that did little more than present the pain and confusion of these individuals, as a work of art it didn’t break much ground. Just about every show I have seen aimed at or written about young people carries the same confusion and angst. 

But this, perhaps fittingly, is often the world of the young person, who believes they are the only one that understands their suffering, who in their pain would like you to understand it to. 

Only such a perspective forgets that everyone suffers, in some form or another. And another night at the theatre that explores the personal, doesn’t bring much new to the table.