SUTCo’s Your Heart’s To Open, Close It – 30 October 2024, Sheffield University Drama Studio

Review by Taylor J.

Director and writer Ambrose Robinson comically encapsulates the heart-breaking hero’s journey of our lovable yet flawed, anxiously attached, golden retriever, ‘Pup’ (played by Matthew Heppell), as he unconditional love, and accountability discovers the price of vulnerability.

The play holds up a painfully truthful mirror to a Gen Z audience. Reflecting their off-beat humour, relationship with love and all its complexities, and the crushing weight of societal expectations and norms. All the while making a joke of itself, how the writer attempts to encapsulate the emotional rollercoaster that is the human experience into words, and on a stage for an audience to reject or accept it, then and there. Very meta, very Gen Z.

Choa Day (played by Claudia Terry) is a breath of fresh air, bursting Pup’s pattern of repression and closemindedness. Presenting the perspective to live presently and operate from his heart instead of his anxious mind. She is the cog in the matrix that is powered by his quarter-life crisis anxieties, exposing his fears of lack and self-imposed limitations and offering him a different choice, a new perspective, giving glimmers of hope;

“I don’t think it’s conspiracy, I think it’s love.”

Pup reminds us that if we are brave enough to rewrite the narratives that hold us hostage to the past, we can live freely and authentically in the present. We must remember that we are the writers of our stories, collaborating with the universe in the people we meet and love. But only we can give ourselves this liberty, it cannot be found in another relationship, holiday or job. It comes from within. The open, authentic heart.