Written and directed by West Australian award-winning playwright, Kerry Bowden, Heart Lines delivers a heartfelt and thought-provoking play between heart donor and heart recipient.
The play directs the audience to view the heart as being more than just a vital organ of the body.
Having never met the family of his heart donor, 23-year-old heart recipient, Noah, played by Nick Stevenson, records several video blogs to the family, expressing his gratitude and how his life has changed for the better since his heart transplant operation. This clever embodiment of these monologues in the form of video blogs in the play allows the character to speak from the heart directly to the audience.
Noah ponders on the type of person his heart recipient was and how he wished he knew more about the recipient.
Through a series flashbacks, the audience are taken back into of the lives of three young housemates living in Fremantle, Western Australia. Like many other young Australians in their early twenties, Anna, James and Tim are juggling university studies with part-time jobs whilst also squeezing a bit of time to socialize. At first, it is unclear as to which one of these housemates becomes the heart donor but as the play progresses, the new traits and hobbies Noah has developed since his operation are so strikingly similar to one of them that there’s a poignancy knowing this character is going to die.
Noah makes a point about the bittersweetness of heart transplants. The obtaining of a healthy heart has meant the death of another person. In this instance, that other person is only twenty years old.
The play is cleverly written as full-circle story. Noah, who is from the Gold Coast, is drawn to the other side of the country Perth, the hometown of his recipient and even more so to Margaret River where his recipient loved to surf. Although unaware, Noah also crosses paths with people who knew the recipient.
To effectively switch between scenes of Noah’s video blogs and the flashbacks, a warm spotlight is used on Noah, bringing an intimate feel to his messages whereas bright fluorescent lighting is used to capture the upbeat and carefree lives of the housemates in the flashbacks.
At only 70 minutes long, Heart Lines is a short and sweet play presented by the Melville Theatre Company who will contribute $1 for every ticket sold to the non-for-profit organization, The West Australian Heart and Lung Transplant Foundation. A worthy play for a worthy cause.
To book tickets to Heart Lines, please visit https://melvilletheatrecompany.au/current-production#cca6dbda-c607-4472-9f7c-054b47d62a0f.
