A Both-And Voyage takes ambiguous loss and neurodivergence to the White Bear Theatre
A Both-And Voyage (Aksel and Space Grandma), a new two-hander by Ekaterina Harrison, opens the VOYAGES Festival at the White Bear Theatre on 25 August.
The VOYAGES Festival, presented by En Route Theatre, begins at the White Bear Theatre on 25 August 2026, and the first night belongs to A Both-And Voyage (Aksel and Space Grandma), a short new play by Ekaterina Harrison, performed at 7pm. The production bills itself simply as a new play on ambiguous loss, and its poster puts the premise better than a synopsis can: "He's not hiding. He's not lost. He's just... not here."
It is a two-hander about a young man who is somehow both there and not there. Several years after his disappearance, Aksel lives in an in-between place where time, location and conversation have stopped behaving as they should, still catching the distant sound of the family he left. Then Space Grandma, his late grandmother, turns up carrying potatoes and a wholly different idea of what finding someone means. What follows is funny, tender and frequently surreal, and it declines to treat him as a problem to be solved, explained or brought neatly home.
The piece is drawn from a longer play, Aksel Is Not Here, which sits with what happens when a person vanishes physically but stays vividly present in the minds of everyone around them. Psychologists call it ambiguous loss: absent in body, unmistakably there in every other sense.
Neurodivergence runs through the work just as strongly. Harrison is interested in the way neurodivergent people withdraw when the world starts asking more than can reasonably be met, and in questioning the assumption that withdrawal is automatically something to be reversed. She writes from experience: she is neurodivergent herself, and she is the author of the EHCP Handbook, a guide for families navigating Education, Health and Care Plans for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities.
The production is directed by Clara Seitz and performed by Arne van der Esch and Angela Sturniolo, with Ekaterina Harrison as writer.
A Both-And Voyage (Aksel and Space Grandma) plays the White Bear Theatre at 7pm on 25 August 2026, opening the VOYAGES Festival.