play. by perhaps, theatre doesn’t just break the fourth wall, it hands you a piece of Lego and asks what you’d like to make with it.

Created and winningly performed by Robbie Fieldwick, with collaboration and tech support from Emmett Aster and delicate sound design from Benjamin Vaughan, this intimate solo work bounces between personal storytelling and a broader poke at why play matters once we’ve (supposedly) grown up. The audience sits in two lines facing each other, ensuring you’re not only watching the show, but seeing a roomful of strangers slowly decide it’s okay to be ridiculous, together. This is a great strength of the work - inviting the audience to share in play and the creation of meaning.

Our tasks were simple: pass notes, keep softly glowing lamps “alive,” lob scrunched paper at a basket without being caught. In an act of poetry, on the performance attended by this reviewer, a wildly enthusiastic eight-year-old was in the crowd, otherwise full of adults, whose joy at being allowed to join in was contagious. His presence underlined the show’s point: play isn’t something we outgrow - we just get rusty.
 
Although the work is advertised as being for adults, it occupies a sweet spot in performance, a rare work that can engage a wide range of audience members and make a temporary community of them.

Fieldwick’s more reflective passages, delivered in elegant poetic language, trace a life shaped by play - a dad inclined to “no,” a bi-lingual Scrabble-shark mum, and the ongoing project of staying playful while “adulting”. Occasionally, the ideas nod a smidge towards didactic ‘TED Talk’ territory, but more often the show makes its case in a fun way: by letting us feel it.

The ending (which came all too soon) isn’t a bow, but a hangout: Lego, D&D, chess, tower building, conversation cards. You don’t just leave having watched a charming show, you leave having played with new friends.