Panning for Gold is a performance about love: finding love, losing love, and moving on. It explores the vulnerability one feels when exposed to the workings of the fragile human heart.
Three young women are attending a group therapy session, while a fourth older woman is running the session. The three attendees have been jilted at the altar - for various reasons - and, as a result of this, are going through heartbreak. So follows a performance set in a therapy room that follows the women’s recovery over a series of sessions. Therapy can be a difficult and ugly process - and one that is normally undertaken in private. Watching a real life therapy session would probably feel quite inappropriate. Transferring it onto the stage felt no less so.
The performers were positioned on four chairs facing each other, and the audience were the observers. While the company fared well in setting up a performance area that suited both the architecture of the venue and the architecture of a therapy room this was, nevertheless, an alienating factor for the audience. Tearing down the fourth wall would have been very effective; as things were, it was difficult to invest in the various characters. I also struggled to suspend my disbelief as some of the therapy techniques employed did not ring true.
While the writer should be given credit for taking on a subject as fraught with difficulty and tension as mental health, at times it felt as if the depth and potential of the themes were beyond her experience (of course I may be wrong), and the script we saw performed suffered because of this. Or perhaps it was the fact that the themes were tackled head-on where a more subtle approach might have proved more effective.
Potential was everywhere in this performance: potential in the subject matter, in the actors, in the writing. There was a lovely line in the script where the therapist likens looking for love to panning for gold. I was searching for the gold in this performance, but it was hidden below the surface.
