A funny, touching and sophisticated new play from a bright, young Australian talent, Christopher Harley.

Ensemble Theatre, Sydney
October 21, 2015

Figuring out a new way of exploring those most timeless (and easily hackneyed) of themes, love and loss, is no easy task, yet Sydney playwright Christopher Harley’s insightful and impressively polished new play, Blood Bank, offers a quirky, touching and highly original route down this well-trodden path.

In the sterile yet emotionally charged environment of a hospital waiting room, a woman doggedly attempts to engage a distracted man in over-friendly banter. From this unassuming beginning a vividly detailed narrative emerges, with a complex but meticulously considered tangle of intersecting stories. At the core of this play is something profound and universal: the weight of our regrets; fear of our own mortality; the pain of grief and loss; the giddy excitement of discovering feelings and the injustice of a stolen future. However Harley packages these rather solemn undercurrents in a shell of bright, effervescent humour that gives the dialogue an immensely compelling authenticity. It’s laugh-out-loud funny, ripe with innuendo and silly colloquialisms, peppered with expletives, but within that there are moments of pure poetry, beautifully...