Synopsis

Floodwaters lap at the edges of a makeshift raft, where a medical textbook lies open next to a half-empty bottle of water, its pages curling in the damp air.

Neil, a haunted-eyed medical student, grips a sculling oar as he steers the floating remnants of a London flat through the drowned cityscape. Beside him, Jo stitches together a patchwork sail from discarded shirts, her fingers working feverishly as if to outpace the grief that threatens to overwhelm her. On the raft’s edge, young Alex peers into the murky depths, his boyish face a mask of curiosity and fear as he searches for glimpses of the world that was.

Holman’s play is a fever dream of survival and reinvention, where characters cling to scraps of their former lives as tenaciously as they do to their makeshift vessels. Through lyrical, often darkly comic dialogue, he explores the tenuous threads that bind people together when all familiar structures have been washed away. The ever-shifting landscape of submerged buildings and newly formed islands becomes a canvas for examining the malleability of human nature – how quickly we can adapt, and how stubbornly we cling to old wounds and outdated notions of self.