Chasing Waves

by Cally Phillips

Two men. One box. The possibilities are endless.In Chasing Waves, two characters who may[or may not] be a philosopher and a physicist probe the nature of life,language and the universe. Faced with what appears to be an ordinary cardboard box, they embark on an extraordinary journey in search of understanding which leads them to Who are we? Where do we start? What is language? What's in the box? And most importantly What is the box? As they play with words and challenge the boundaries between audience and drama in a style reminiscent of Stoppard, Pirandello, Crimp and Beckett, the two men ask us to forget everything we've learned and embark instead on a journey of understanding.Alsoi s an iExtras section which charts the background and the production process.And featuring a short unpublished absurdist play Benito Boccanegra’s Big Break. The power of the writing is enough to make one feel one is in a theatre, and visualising this bizarre debate between two philosophers and a box that may or not contain a cat, which may or not be dead (or indeed alive) is no problem at all. The argument is stimulated by bits of action, which, while necessarily small, are extremely funny.The philosophers are Wittgenstein and Schrodinger, and from the start they are more aware than an audience is perhaps normally expected to be that they are, in fact, not. Schrodinger and Wittgenstein, that is. They are two actors – probably. One of them, at least, begins to doubt very seriously if he can be an actor, for what, after all, does an actor consist of? Even the audience becomes an area of doubt, as the characters/actors/philosophers mingle with them to try to pin down a reality. Reality? Forget it.The point is, though, there is action, and interaction. The philosophers become characters(ie interesting human beings), and the confines of the stage also suggest a boundless world. The dialogue is sharp, intelligent, erudite, probing, ‘deep’. On stage I’m willing to bet it would be extremely funny, too.Full review by Jan Needle on Indie Ebook Review site at

117 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

My writing career has 'downshifted' from screen to stage to page over 20 years. And now it focuses on digital. I'm in the process of publishing my back catalogue of stage plays as well as working on novels and 'advocacy' pieces. I write short stories regularly for McStorytellers, I have been editor of the Indie eBook Review and now review for Reading Between the Lines. I'm director of the Edinburgh eBook Festival and if that's not enough I'm working for a couple of Publishers - HoAmPresst, Guerrilla Midgie and Ayton Press, all of them with different niches. Spare time - hobbies? You've got to be joking. Between reading, writing and publishing there is no spare time. And I wouldn't have it any other way.