Allison Davies’s play, Tiny Fragments of Beautiful Light, is a warm, compassionate and playful love story based on her own experience of autism. It was first seen in Newcastle in 2023, and Birmingham is the last stop on this 2025 tour.
We first meet Elsa (Hannah Genesius) aged fourteen, full of hormones and hopelessly in love with a girl at school, Lauren Cole (Yemisi Oyinloye). When something, or someone, attracts Elsa’s attention, they acquire a ‘glimmer’, a kind of aura, and Lauren has it in spades. Lauren smells of chips, and Elsa loves chips, so she calls Lauren seventeen times in twenty-two minutes, which does not make the favourable impression Elsa was hoping for.
Elsa doesn’t edit out sense impressions the way the rest of us learn to, so every sense is turned up to eleven all the time. She thinks of her mind as an octopus: sometimes it is curled up quietly, but when it gets agitated, she is powerless to stop it. This gives her account of her autism a Freudian slant: the octopus is her id, the seat of her fears and desires, she has some sense of social conventions from her superego but her ego fights a losing battle trying to steer a course between them.
After Lauren, Elsa gets fixated on Lewis, a sixth-former. That doesn’t go well either, and Elsa’s mum (Zoe Lambert) takes her to the doctor. Elsa’s condition has the literalness you might already associate with autism (Doctor: Take a seat. Elsa: Where to?), but when she suffers a sensory overload, the octopus takes over and she lashes out. The doctor offers various diagnoses: ADHD, maybe? Or bipolar? Or she might be a psychopath? Elsa is put on medication and sent to a hippy Australian therapist. The therapist comments, “you seem to have a lot of repressed anger”, to which Elsa replies, “it’s not repressed”.
The timeline then jumps back to primary school when Elsa bites a boy’s ear because it looks like an onion. Elsa needs structure to help her cope—if it’s Friday, it must be ice cream day—and when her routine is disrupted, she loses her bearings. Her mum recognises that her daughter is not sick, she’s just different, but different can be difficult.
The third section is Elsa as an adult. She excels academically at university, but she struggles socially, “I am a plague ship adrift on an ocean of loneliness”. She sees other people coping and she tries to copy them in order to fit in, but spending the whole day pretending to be someone else is hard work. After graduation, she finds it difficult to hold down a job. Simple things like echoey rooms and squeaky doors can drive her to distraction, but she is taken on at the local garden centre where the sights, sounds, smells and touch of the greenhouse plants are perfectly suited to her sensitivity. One day, a new customer, Carmen, comes into her greenhouse, and the glimmer is back.
The play consists of Elsa’s first-person narrative with various interruptions and metatheatrical comments to model dramaturgically something of the experience of autism. The show is not just about autism, it is designed for a neurodiverse audience. We are offered headphones to adjust the sound design, the programme includes a ‘moment map’ so we can see which audible and emotional stimuli are coming and when and Elsa invites us to join her in an exercise routine halfway through in case, like her, we also find it difficult to sit still for too long.
The cast of three are excellent, and Verity Quinn’s set, Simon Cole’s lighting and video and Roma Yagnik’s sound design are beautifully integrated to create a sense experience which enables a neurotypical audience to better understand autism without overwhelming a neurodiverse one.
Reviewer: Andrew Cowie