Fracture

Fracture tells the story of a man on the edge of psychosis. Twenty-something Charlie is living in a cramped apartment with a bathtub for a refrigerator and two friends in a couple. Life is difficult but mundane: looking for a job, wiring money from old, dependable Pat to pay for groceries, reading the newspaper and squabbling over the merits of soy milk. But Charlie has run away from something, and his nights are no longer peaceful. Instead, they're haunted by a terrible recurring nightmare that leaves him screaming and clawing and yelling for help.

At its heart, Fracture is about relationships. It's about the responsibilities we take on, the aspects of other people we internalise and how our own expectations and fears can tear us apart even when there's nothing physically wrong with us. The relationships between the characters feel genuine, and Charlie's panic attacks are frightening and disturbingly convincing. It is an intense experience, with rare bursts of humour providing breathless calm between psychosis and conflict. While Fracture succeeds in taking us inside the mind of a broken man who is only one traumatic event away from ourselves, it leaves us guessing helplessly at some bigger meaning seeming to lurk just behind what unfolds on stage.