Great Trauma starts from a feeling that is painfully familiar but rarely staged with such precision: the sense that something is wrong long before anyone will name it as harm. It is less a play “about trauma” than a study of how trauma lives on in the body, in the air and in the room.

At its core is a simple, relentless action: people moving stones. The rocks are handmade, developed with a textile artist from powder and fragments until they approach the weight and resistance of real stone. Six performers spend the piece carrying, stacking and re-stacking them, missing their footing, collapsing with them and starting again. As the evening unfolds, the choreography is built not out of ideal shapes but out of what the body does under strain: the tremor of a thigh trying to hold, the quick adjustment of a knee, a shoulder that tightens to mask fatigue. The production treats these micro-reactions as content, not as flaws. What we watch is not an illustration of “burden” but a live negotiation between bodies and weight – a negotiation that many spectators will feel echoing in their own muscles and breath.

Around this labour, the space itself is made unstable. Rather than serving as neutral backdrop, the environment becomes an instrument. Light is filtered, fractured and redirected across stone, skin and dust; air is cooled or thickened; haze hangs and disperses; ice melts and quietly redraws the path of a beam. Nothing is showy, yet the room feels continuously on the verge of tipping. The design suggests an indoor weather system – a kind of nervous climate that everyone on stage and off must inhabit together. In place of narrative exposition, the piece offers a slowly shifting pressure: some zones of the auditorium feel suddenly exposed, others oddly airless, as if the atmosphere were taking a position before any character does.

Threaded through this is an attention to brief, almost throwaway phenomena: a shadow that moves faster than the body that casts it, a line of powder left by a dragged stone, light catching in a suspended particle. These fleeting images give outline to something more persistent. The work’s political target is not spectacular violence but structural neglect – the long, low-level tension experienced by those treated as temporary, interchangeable, or marginal: migrants, queer bodies, precarious workers, people living with the aftershocks of abuse or mental distress. Their experience rarely arrives as a single, nameable event; it more often resembles bad weather that never quite clears. Great Trauma translates that background weather into a visible, almost meteorological field of stress.

There is no cathartic confession, no tidy resolution. Instead, the piece insists that trauma is not only a word in a report or a diagnosis, but a pattern of forces acting on and through bodies, matter and climate. By the end, what lingers is less a story than a set of sensations: the memory of weight, the image of a pile that keeps growing, the trace of dust in the air that refuses to fully settle. The production’s achievement is to make that invisible field legible without simplifying it – to let audiences feel, in their own nervous systems, how a life lived under constant conditional acceptance might actually register, second by second, in the flesh.