I'm aware that I have not written on this blog for a while. Rest assured I am still going to the theatre as regularly as I can though not as regularly as I would like. Plays I have recently enjoyed but didn't have anything blogworthy to say about, have been Birthday at the Royal Court, an excellently performed Winter's Tale from the Rough Mechanicals and a precise and beautifully designed Calendar Girls at the Miller Centre.
But yesterday I came down to Havant to see Bench Theatre perform 13 Objects, directed by Damon Wakelin. And not having seen a Howard Barker play before I wanted to record what I thought of it.
This wordy, philosophical play is just my cup of tea. It consists of 13 short plays each centred around an object. The Bench performed the play with a cast of 13 which was apt. The language is incredible, it washes around you like word soup. It is like listening to a poem and then fragments of the text jump out at you, by turns horrifying and funny, profound and absurd. By showing you snapshots of widely varying characters the play captured the many contradictions, the joy and futility of human existence.
Above all though, this was an acting triumph. We watched one brilliant, honed performance after another trotted out like a feast. I can't possibly give all the actors credit here, the quality of all of them was startling. I watched actors I have admired since I was a teenager give performances I didn't know they had in them.
I won't go through all the plays but just give some examples to demonstrate the contrast. The first play is about death, a nightmarish 'officer' ushers in two crying women and urges them to dig their own graves. He plays with them, perhaps he will kill one of them, or both. Neil Kendal played the murderous officer with relish, at times almost Dickensian. Not knowing what to expect and quite horrified by this grim start the audience was carried along through his monologue by his magnetic stage presence and casual brutality. Julie Wood and Claire Lyne cried through this whole first play, the crying became like background noise setting the macabre tone for Kendal's monologue.
Then the second play started in a bright coffee house and Alice Corrigan gave a incredible performance as a prim slightly unhinged lady who had lost her lover. She delivered a monologue about how many of the cups in the cafe had been touched by his lips, throwing one on the floor to break it as she dryly observed 'one less'. It was funny and touching and, like so many of the performances in the play, completely spot on.
I wish I could write about everyone. Julie Wood's petulant and dimly disturbing Queen Elizabeth, Sharman Callam's old woman, Robin Hall's understated adulteress, Kathryn Godwin's manic optician, (whose lines about our gluttonous desire to see everything, shoving sights into our eye sockets pretty much summed up how I felt watching this play.)
I particularly found Terry Smyth's billionaire who buys a painting for £4.5million and destroys it electrically entertaining. Like many of the plays it dimly reminded me of something else, in this case a Roald Dahl short story. As I watched the whole play images of other things flashed into my head: Blackadder, Cloud Atlas, Brecht, Amelie, 50 Shades of Grey. I think that indicates how wide the scope of the play is. To say this was an ambitious play to take on is an understatement.
One thing I found surprising about the play was how much the emotions and thoughts of the characters were spelt out in the script. Lines like 'I'm crying,' 'I am not unmoved' seemed superfluous with such precise acting performances. I particularly felt this in 'Cracked Lens' where the idealist photographer, unable to bring himself to photograph anything finds the camera turned on himself and this time agrees to a photo. He didn't need the lines about being trapped into exposing his idealism as narcissism, we already spotted that as soon as the girl took the camera from him. Strange that Barker felt the need to spell everything out rather than trust the actors to show it when he gave the actors so much freedom of interpretation in other ways, minimal punctuation leaving director and cast to make their own choices about rhythm, emphasis and pauses.
I can't finish this rather long and rambling post without mentioning the inspired staging. This is the first time I have ever seen a company rearrange the seating of The Spring's studio theatre into the round and it was inspired, making the plays incredibly intimate. The way the actors had to keep moving around to perform to all four sides also gave a natural energy to long monologues which added to the feeling of a play crammed full of life.
The positions and paths of the 13 objects were marked out on the bare black floor with different coloured tape. The genius of this idea was that while you were watching one play, you were also remembering the previous objects, and anticipating those to come. The stage was transformed into a palimpsest, not only tying the plays together but elegantly demonstrating the idea of these objects leaving indelible traces in the characters' lives. The minimal set and stylistic setting meant that the 13 objects themselves shone with so much more significance as soon as they arrived, because they were the only objects to focus on. It was as if nothing else existed.
Bench Theatre, you clever, clever people.
