Pebbles on the Beach

Life’s a beach. Well, sometimes; although it depends on how you feel about beaches. There are times when all is sunny and serene, then the next moment you’ve got sand in your picnic. Pebbles on the Beach is an exploration of the tidal rhythms of life; of love and longing, of regret and forgiveness, of the beautiful amidst the mundane.

Every day, Leo wakes up and he tells himself, “Today, I’m going to be someone different.” But today, he hasn’t woken up, and surrounded by the pebbles of Brighton beach, he is being forced to re-live all those days that he never had the courage to seize. With the potential to be a sixty-minute rollercoaster of ecstatic zeniths and unbearably tragic nadirs, writer Joanna Pinto has instead created something much more poignant because of its insightful truth. Leo’s memories are not all sunshine and palm trees; with teenage pregnancy, failed relationships, dysfunctional families, and death, this ensemble offer their audience far more than light entertainment. But as some of the key figures of Leo’s past intermittently join him on the beach, though these disjointed biographical glimpses are often moving, they are equally peppered with the comic, the petty, and the simple frustrations of life.

Pebbles on the Beach poetically reminds its audience that the small things matter. Each pebble is integral to the making of the beach; the mistakes, the banal, the imperfect, all have a part to play in the beauty of the whole.