Death is ‘unwelcome’ at the best of times, but if you’re a teenager, the loss of a parent can be devastating and lead to an emotional arrested development. So how does one at that age stop the downward spiral of depression? Is that even possible?  Written by Christina Knight and directed by Eamon O’Flynn, Black Velvet could broadly be described as a dark comedy – though personally I think that’s a bit reductive. There are certainly moments of levity, though they are always ‘well-timed’ – a way for the audience to ‘let out’ nervous energy after prolonged periods of tension.

The play begins with Llew (Charles Ison), a young man who one evening visits the grave of his mother. This event also coincides with him ‘needing’ to get away from his flat where the sight of his injured pet still ‘haunts him’. But after spending some time ‘talking his mother’ there, he realises that right behind the gravestone is 17-year-old Aoife (Christina Knight) who has awoken from her sleep – and desperate to get back to the ‘nothingness’ of slumber…

Aoife, of course, has her reasons for being there, but her manner with Llew oscillates between being deflective and antagonistic, making it hard for him to work out what exactly her situation is. Personality-wise, Llew is no aggressive ‘alpha-type’, and it is for this reason that Aoife feels she can ‘hurt’ him and get him to leave, one way or another. But just like a riverside reed, he ‘takes’ whatever Aoife throws at him and shows that his empathy doesn’t make him any less a human being. More so in fact.

While Black Velvet (as you might expect) deals with some ‘heavy’ themes, it isn’t ‘grimdark’ or sombre for its own sake. Tonally, of the top of my head, it complements the movie Garden State, which candidly addresses how ‘senseless’ death affects those ‘left behind’ and the multitude of feelings that accompany such experiences in the short and long term. Hats off to the principal actors for making us care about their respective characters’ lives and to Knight herself (as a writer), for crafting a tale that not only tackles bereavement and broken families, but other subjects that rarely appear in any form on the stage, in an entertaining fashion.

© Michael Davis 2024

Black Velvet ran at the Old Red Lion (ORL) Theatre from 29th to 31st July, as part of the Camden Fringe festival. It returns to ORL on 3rd and 4th August at 8.30pm.

Black Velvet