Below The Tree Line
30 November 2025
The Space
2.0 out of 5.0 stars
Below the Tree Line recently staged a rehearsed reading at The Space theatre, presenting a new work by Codex Theatre.
Beatrice, and ambitious Asian American woman, starts university with the ambition to write about her lived experience, about marginalised people’s experiences in the world. Instead, she gets involved with two of her fellow students, one who turns the story of their one night stand into a successful short story, another who is unable to express his emotions due to repressed trauma.
The rehearsed reading is well presented, with three actors delivering the lines while a fourth reads stage directions. There is some decent acting despite the limited presentation typical of rehearsed readings, the lack of a full staging doesn’t hold the actors back in the slightest.
While the idea behind the script sounds compelling and interesting, there isn’t much to the narrative at all. It unfolds over one year at university, and revolves entirely around a very angry Beatrice who feels used and taken advantage of by Ed after he uses their night of passion to write a story that draws from her experience as a marginalised woman, but she never does anything about it except for shouting at Ed and complaining to her friend Avery. All three characters are very one-dimensional with no development throughout the play. Especially Avery feels very much like a wet lettuce who has no ambitions and barely a personality of his own.
Overall, there just isn’t much material to work with, just a series of very long reiterations of people telling each other how they should be feeling, excessively drawn out conversations that do have some humour in them, but are overall extremely juvenile and unrefined. The story comes across as if a 13 year old tried to imagine how 19 year old university students might behave. This script feels very much like a teen drama written for the screen, rambling on without moving the plot forward or letting characters grow.
