A DIFFERENT LANGUAGE. To 26 March.

Tour

A DIFFERENT LANGUAGE
by Renato Gabrielli

Suspect Culture theatre company Tour to 2005
Runs 1hr 35 min No interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 11 March at Royal Exchange Studio Manchester

The language divide imaging the distance between people.Unlike this review, Suspect Culture's programme incorporates the credit for Renato Gabrielli's script between director and designer. Aptly so; as in Suspect's work generally over the past decade of Scottish theatre, here is an amalgam of theatrical elements, text being an equal partner with action, lighting and sound in building a compound impact. Often brilliant, the results have sometimes seemed mannered or become tiresome; here the theatrical high-wire act holds its balance and works an intriguing treat.

There's a physical balancing act too to this Scottish/Italian co-production as a British woman and Italian man make contact, are attracted or repulsed on the series of narrow switchback platforms forming the set. The only refuge (for her) is a sink, tucked away at ground-level.

Graham Eatough's fluid production works through the relationship's up and downs on these perilous narrow paths, mirroring the relationship's twists and sharp angled moments. There's a relentless pace, underscored by Kenny MacLeod's soundscape. A series of opening questions, in English and Italian respectively, carry the impersonal intrusion of an amplified voiceover. The performers are both applicants to and employees of a dating bureau, The Agency, which soon acquires a sinister, capital-letter command over them.

As the script switches between their languages a sense emerges of the gaps to be bridged, ditches and chasms of understanding. The two drive forward or back off, the identities of Agency workers and love-seekers, detached professionals and would-be involved individuals becoming inextricably bound together without conclusively merging.

These people are objects, their words vocalisations of a state of being simultaneously demonstrated in expression and movement within the landscape of a high-tech production. This doesn't deny the major contribution of two high-quality performances, and emohasises the sense of triumph as their own voices are established against the voiceover's impersonal demands.

But we don't dwell on the individual's state; the response is to the situation. This gives the company's work its characteristic distant, self-conscious theatricality, illustrating human predicaments that go beyond specific individuals (something like techno-Brecht). In a piece where coldly impersonal Agency and heat-seeking, nervous individuals fuse, the method fits like a hand-made glove.

Performers:
Selina Boyack, Sergio Romano

Director: Graham Eatough
Designer: Luigi Mattiazzi
Sound: Kenny MacLeod

2005-03-18 06:49:37