Jigsaw makes the vastness a little more bearable

“Hey! How’s it going? You there? Hello? Can you hear me?”

It’s the opening line to virtual conferencing calls across the globe. The faulty video, the delayed audio, the usual comedy of errors that accompany human interaction via digital connection. In Jigsaw, the stage is an online meeting platform, and the main characters are two old friends reuniting.

A live-digital performance written and performed by Ian ‘Ewok’ Robinson and James Cunningham, and directed by Sylvaine Strike, Jigsaw is a bizarre, hilarious, and somewhat sentimental bit of virtual theatre. The play follows friends Simon (Cunningham) and Paul (Robinson) as they engage in a series of online chats, arguments, debates, and a strange amount of pseudo-philosophical musings.

Simon has something going on in his head, both medically and existentially, and Paul is still working through the loss of his father. It’s clear that the two friends haven’t seen each other (physically) for a good while, but that they share a lot of history.

Theirs is a stereotypically white, male friendship where sincerity, softness, and care are very often snowed under by wry humour, sports news, and dad jokes. Even their first call is filled with awkward pauses and passive aggressive jabs as they attempt to reconnect with each other. A few calls in and the two are carrying on as if no time had passed at all.

While all of this might sound rather pedestrian (both Paul and Simon are pretty damn vanilla), I mention the details of this friendship, because much of Jigsaw’s narrative draws its richness and memorability from these simple moments. Bear in mind that the majority of this play takes place in the two rectangular speaker boxes that Zoom-users and the like will know well, and while emotional dissonance is rife on virtual platforms, Robinson and Cunningham do a fantastic job at translating a believable and entertaining relationship via the pixelated gaze of a webcam and an internet connection.

Jigsaw is not solely about the rekindling of a friendship, though. The script is littered with abstract material, from frivolous metaphysical platitudes – ‘grief is just an excess of love’, ‘you have to have nothing to understand something’, ‘the only constant is change’ – to imaginary cats and shape-shifting fruit. Many of these oddities may be attributed to Simon who, harboring a strange growth in his head, seems to lose touch with his immediate reality on more than one occasion. Often times, these departures from reality will take the form of animated clips that play out in dream-like sequences: Exploding minds, monologues on evolution and order, nonsensical lie detector tests (administered by a stern MoMo Matsunyane) and even a feverish (albeit overwritten) segment where Strike voices a curious fish adrift in a sea of time.

Jigsaw is listed as clocking in at around 50 minutes, although my viewing ended up being about an hour and 15 minutes. That’s a long time to keep a viewer glued to the screen of a phone or laptop, but the Jigsaw team do well to play with the structures and limitations of a two-paneled video call. Outside of the animated segments, the two employ bathroom mirrors, offscreen interferences, and simple human choreography inside of a flat, digital box to keep things visually interesting.

Finally, the commitment to live performance is another one of Jigsaw’s triumphs. While more than a few lines of dialogue were lost to lag (during my viewing, at least), the simple fact that one knows they are watching a performance play itself out in real time to varying parts of the world is enough to rekindle some of that live theatre magic. We’ll be back in the theatres one day, yes, but for now, artists like Strike, Cunningham, and Robinson are doing a solid job at making the vast, cold reaches of the internet feel a little more human.

Jigsaw is free to view but has a limited number of performances. Find performance dates and times here.

Created by the company, based on an original concept by: James Cuningham
Writers and performers: James Cuningham and Iain Robinson
Director: Sylvaine Strike
Screen direction and editing: Karen Logan
Animation: Hello Pocket
Stage management: Andrea Van Tonder and Karen Logan
Music: Beaunoise www.beaunoise.com and the voices of Sylvaine Strike and MoMo Matsunyane