Part of this play is watching a man drown – an actor, and a character, who we all love – on a nightly basis. Watching the life go out of his eyes. He’s so good at it that I feel I have watched him die every night for the last week.

It’s just a simple stage illusion of a light covering him, but it’s breathtakingly painful. It reveals everything.

If it were more realistic, you wouldn’t actually get to see him die. As it is, the lack of realism forces you into the emotional truth of the situation. Abstraction, of one kind, brings out emotion. The detail of realism can get in the way of that.

Every night, I see the exact moment when his eyes under the water become dead, and it’s horrifyingly well done.