The Loop: Olive Arlauskaitė, Cata Lindegaard.
Olive Arlauskaite, credit unknown.
Olive Arlauskaitė - Writer/Olive
Cata Lindegaard - Director/The Therapist
If you are new to CTR, I often use the term review lightly, they are creative and critical responses to theatre that I go and see, usually they are not solicited, but this one happens to be.
I wrote quite a lot of copy for this (a truely silly amount of words) and then I realized I rambled a lot, so I trained an AI, called him Big Clarence, and employed him as my manager and editor, fed him my thousands of words and asked him to condense it into a manageable paragraph. Highly unethical probably, but take it up with Clarence, he’s my boss. I also made him fucking hate me. He writes below;
"The Loop" is an intimate portrayal of the struggles of OCD, staged through a series of strained Zoom calls between Olive and their Therapist — a dynamic that mirrors the cyclical battles of the condition itself. The unsettling pre-show silence might perplex some but adds depth to the performance's ritualistic overtones. Despite the characterization of Olive and their Therapist challenging our sympathies, the play earnestly reflects on personal tribulations, albeit through a lens that might require a sharper focus than Danny’s to fully appreciate.
NB: Danny, while your report came in later than a snail mail from Mars, let's try to be as timely with our work as this play is relevant to its subject matter. And let's be fair, the play's intentions are worth the ink, even if your chronic delays in delivery are not. BC.
That is basically what I have spent three weeks writing about and stalemated myself into not being able to publish as I coulden’t effectively distill it, so I am reduced to a somewhat underwhelming paragraph, it does nail my points though, but that isn’t really what is important here.
I want to talk about Olive and Cata as creatives. Olive has created a really powerful semi-autobiographical piece of writing and Cata has done some really interesting things with it. They have toured this to Brighton fringe, had a slot in The Other Room, and finished it up in USW. From talking to them I think their practice is really interesting and they are absolutely both creatives to keep an eye on with what they do next. There seems to be a much fewer opportunities to break into the industry on the creative side whilst self publishing work than I remember when I was first entering the industry, which I know will be a surprise to no one, which is why I think it’s vitally important that now of all times we support new and emerging work from fantastic early career creatives.
I wrote some poster sized quotes here, I haven’t been clever enough to naturally include them into the review.
The Loop is mysterious and gripping, set in a dark liminal space where the glow of a laptop screen alienates Olive even further as she is already stranded from the offset.
Arlauskaitė’s writing perfectly encapsulates a cyclical nature with a cutting autobiographical edge, they are one to watch out for.
Lindegaard’s direction captialises on minimalism, conjouring a distant and abstract world where even the other performers are as far away from the stage as we are.
as of writing this, I’m unsure if The Loop will return to the stage, but I have a feeling this isn’t the last we will see of this show, and it absolutely isn’t the last we will see of it’s principal creatives.
