Ira and Eddie are siblings who have lost their parents. Eddie wants Ira to sell her half of the pub they inherited and escape the boring, rundown seaside town she continues to live in. Ira wants Eddie to go diving with her even though his husband thinks diving is too risky.

The slight plot is oddly hard to follow. Apart from a few lurches into anger and grief, the actors (Camilla Anvar as Ira, and Morgan Beale as Eddie) remain deadpan, which is funny and endearing, but gives few clues as to what is happening, or why. They go diving. They go dancing. They have a surreal encounter with an underwater oracle.

The temptation would be to read an ecological message into the ocean setting, but there’s no hint of mircoplastics or impending drought. It’s staged as live ‘cinema’, which means the audience is watching a large screen, with the action being filmed behind. A musician (Faye James) creates an eerie immersive soundtrack, and a puppeteer (Beckett Gray) films the sets, props and creatures in tiny boxes on a table.

Most of the images are very beautiful. They have an uncanny, twee, remote innocence, like a rediscovered children’s animation from the 1970s. An anecdote about whale bones and rival hobbyists tips into folk horror and hauntology. It’s only marred by the incessant diving scenes. The cardboard Iris and Eddie shoogle downwards to a shipwreck, or upwards back home without any firm sense of purpose, and the script doesn’t give them anything to say about killing time.

The enigmatic, almost anthropomorphic, borderline animist animals could have been given a bigger role. A small crab lurks about like a hostile spy or a harbinger of doom. A whale is either dispensing a dire warning, or robust advice. At one point Eddie might be appeasing a God of the Deep or he’s trying to choke it. There’s a lot of scope for ambiguous incidents to spice up the humdrum shoogle.

Paradoxically, it might have been more dramatic to put the characters on the periphery and make the town of Ratmouth Bay the star of an impressionistic documentary, aggregating all of the things that Eddie is desperate to escape from, and Ira is deeply attached to.  The name makes it sound like a den of iniquity or a gateway to hell. You could imagine the tatty remains of its tourist heyday mingling with the ghosts of smugglers and the stench of briny sewage.

The Wreck is at Old Lab at Summerhall until Mon 31 Aug 2026