CARNESKY'S GHOST TRAIN. To 30 May.

Coventry

CARNESKY'S GHOST TRAIN

University Square (foot of Cathedral steps) Coventry To 30 May 2005
Sun 2-4pm; 5-8pm
Mon 11.30am-1.30pm; 2-4pm; 6-8pm
Runs c12 min No interval

TICKETS: at entrance (£4 each)
Review: Timothy Ramsden 27 May

Transience and the unknowable Euro-lives glimpsed in tantalising brevity.My 5pm ride began at almost 6 o' clock; there again, this show was supposed to have arrived in Coventry last spring and didn't. So, a year and 50 minute late. Clearly, Carnesky's Ghost Train is determined to conform to the stereotype of Britain's main-gauge railways. In all other respects it runs on a very individual track.

In rickety old 2-seat compartments, warned about safety rules (to be taken seriously given some of the forthcoming manifestations), up to 20 people set off on a hairpin ride, going some 5 times round the track. There are regular ghost-ride phenomena skeletons, a figure shooting out of a wall screaming, a dark object looking set to drop on the passengers. But the people in Marisa Carnesky's creation are all women, some suffering, collapsing; in one case an Asiatic maid taking tea to a skeleton-filled hotel room. She's seen 3 times, a kind of storyboard imaging of her experience.

Another woman stands by a wall of family photos, apparently several generations of a European, maybe Jewish, bourgeois family. As the train makes one of its few en route pauses, she slowly collapses, being engulfed by the ground. Then there are livelier images, one woman playing with magical, projected birds as they fly around, another dancing maybe as if her life, or livelihood, depends on it, perhaps for joy.

It's no wonder the object vaguely seen looming overhead at one point is a suitcase. These images, come upon during giddy turns or at surprise moments in the dark, are based on the stories of women immigrants moving westwards through Europe over a century. As the train returns finally to its starting point, the separate beings are seen parading, then eventually retreating, together in a world at once near yet separate, a gauzily misty limbo (with some suggestion of a deserted playground).

It's unique and fascinating, sideshow lives of history made the central attraction. But they remain tantalising images. Vividly etching a theme, these characters' individual lives stay beyond reach. How fine it would be to read, or see, them in fuller detail.

Cast and credits not available.

2005-05-29 13:15:13