How it Ended

You Need Me’s haunting tale of a young Welsh girl who falls in love with a French fighter pilot in wartime Swansea is a masterclass in poetic, physical storytelling.

Lillian sees a chance to escape from her four orphaned sisters and life of toil when Raymond flies into town, allowing herself to be swept up in a whirlwind romance and blown across the sea with him to France. Once there, the language barrier between the two is no longer a source of endearing confusion, but a fatally divisive fault line in an marriage which, like so many wartime romances, has ripened into bitter disappointment.

Five actresses tell her tale with nimble deftness, their principle prop a single white sheet which becomes baby, bump and bedclothes, while a musician crouched in a corner adds live sound effects with a guitar, some castanets and an assortment of whistles.

Emily Watson Howes’ direction is outstanding, somehow lending this tiny space a filmic panorama with her perspective shifts and pacy editing. Some of the most moving scenes are those which are entirely wordless and over in the blink of an eye – Lillian turning to rest her head on her elder sister’s shoulder in the cinema, stumbling upon her domineering mother-in-law singing French nursery rhymes to her child.

Ironically, the production is let down only by how it ends – with an abrupt full stop, which cuts short what is otherwise one of the most exciting pieces of physical theatre on the fringe.