...AT THE DAWN OF THE 8th DAY. To 29 November.

Glasgow

...AT THE DAWN OF THE 8th DAY

Tramway 4 27-29 November 2003
Runs 1hr No interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 28 November

New life - but it seems to lead to sterility.This show leaves me divided. It's divided itself, a black curtain midway effectively creating two spaces, each with its own audience - which of 2 doors you use determines what you see.

Unlike some such shows, there's no attept to move either spectators or action, giving a repeat and a chance to see the whole experience. I joined the shorter queue, which leads me to suspect news wasout that one side had more fun than the other. Here, as Kamal Arafa's backchat with his audience wafted through the divide, was the friendly, interactive side of performance art.

Subsequently, video footage gave glimpses of what was going on. Audience members were set to make stiffened paper receptacles, suggesting model boats - or arks, while being timed by a fellow audience member.

Meanwhile, we suffered the severer side of experimentalism, watching Neil Francis bore a whole in pack after pack of sugar (though they contained sand) and pouring the contents into a model boat - or ark (only later were we to perceive the termendous homogeneity of the experience and see how this related to the origami-and-paste proceedings behind us).

True, there was other entertainment. On separated TV screens, the performers talked inaudibly away at one another across the stage's width. And a larger screen showed a solitary figure staring out to sea as the tide came in. Perhaps he was enjoying himself as much as we were.

Still, we had some interactivity of our own to keep us going. After he had emptied a packet, Francis folded it carefully and presented it to an audience member (though the audience numbers ran out long before the packs were used up). Over the branded packaging was taped a message about - Noak and the Ark and the replenishment of earth. Goodness, there are themes here.

Communication, for instance. Every so often, our performer responded to a beep by appearing to desert us (maybe some felt tempted to follow). But he was only going to adjust a video camera (where would theatre's avant-garde be without them?), a prelude to a telephone conversation between the two, in which Francis seemed to be a customer attempting to complaoine about being sent the incorrect colour of stapler.

In a moment that undoubtedly caught reality, Arafa's staple executive kept asking him to hold, putting the 'phone down on him. In the firm tradition of visual/ physical/ experimental theatre, this single idea was stretched out as if self-sufficient to encompass a whole strand of the 'action'.

It might have seemed more sufficient if the camera hadn't shown both people giving every impression of reading the 'phone script. An image of the falsity of business relations? Or a failure to get to grips in time with the material? Sorry, both, but you need to earn our trust.

This 3-night showing was one of Tramway's 'Dark Lights' commissions, aimed at allowing newly graduated artists (here from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama's Contemporary Theatre Practice course) to develop ideas. It's a valuable programme to give public breathing space to new artists.

Audience members might find it tedious piffle, amusingly pretentious or a voyage into the new age of performance. There are undoubtedly ideas at work here, and it's encouraging to find not all theatre graduates are funnelling themselves into revivals of Private Lives or TV soaps and sitcoms.

But, allowing Noel Coward some comeback, I couldn't help thinking of his established star-actor Garry Essendine, in Present Laughter, seeing off the insistent, self-obsessed young playwright Roland Maule.

As elements in a more complex piece, 8th Day would be intriguing no doubt. By themselves they make for an evening (or part-evening) more interesting in form than content - and enough to give one a dangerously Stalinist contempt for formalism.

And for negativity. The screen figure walked out to sea, Arafa trampled the boats - arks - people had made, Francis trod down his sand-filled craft. The stapler problem was never sorted; communication got nowhere. Things, surely, aren't that bad - even from the viewpoint of someone starting out on a career in theatre?

Performers:
Neil Francis, Kamal Arafe

Director: Mark Traynor

2003-11-30 18:55:09