GENEVA. To 17 January.
Newcastle-upon-Tyne
GENEVA
by Jane Arnfield
Newcastle Playhouse To 17 January 2004
Mon-Sat 7.30pm
Runs 1hr 10min No interval
TICKETS: 0191 230 5151
Review: Timothy Ramsden 9 January
A fine interplay of physical and emotional resonances in a beautifully controlled performance.
Above 26,000 feet over sea-level, the human body behaves strangely. The human heart behaves strangely at any height - and at unpredictable times. Drawing on a moderate lifetime's experience of the latter and research into the former, Jane Arnfield has developed a fascinating reflection. This piece might be called: 'Life - is it worth it?' It says a lot for her presence the answer is an unequivocal Yes.
Asking live mountaineers, and reading up on dead ones, Arnfield relates the fears and fascinations of mounting the heights. The title's taken from a final spur before Everest's summit, named Geneva after a Swiss mountain expedition died there, giving a fateful undernote throughout.
First there's an illustrated lecture, mixing documentary info with reflections on such matters as risk-taking, commitment (the moment a climber commits their life to the mountain, as a person, no less vulnerably, to another) and the five mental stages induced by approaching death.
This is delivered to a small audience, seated in the wings of Newcastle Playhouse's stage. Arnfield (in a co-production by Northern Stage and Quarantine) captures the manner and tone of a lecturer - someone not a natural performer but capable and gaining experience - in a natural, unmannered way. It takes a moment's thought to recognise the performer's skill in making such a natural match.
But there are strange moments which point to director Richard Gregory's involvement, silences surrounding a blackout, and the video with which we're left, showing Arnfield attempting to pitch a tent on a windy, grassy hilltop.
After which, a rear curtain flies away, revealing the full stage depth, wing to wing, polite rows of auditorium seating half impinging on the mind from eyes' corners.
Gregory's non-naturalistic, image-rich style is clear now, as Arnfield hangs on a rope, behind her a mountainous theatre wall, ominously coloured red, the long stage littered with hundreds of wired-up light-bulbs, making her movement like walking along a beach pebbled with egg-shells.
It's a visual complexity expressive of the script's reworkings. What had been lecture notes embroidered by comments, becomes an emotional journey through human emotions anchored in one life, with a shaping and control that keeps thundering emotional pleading well at bay.
Here's a person lost in existence - a mass of illumination, at times brightening and darkening in a multi-watt Mexican wave. Jane plain and unadorned, then kitting herself out in frock and cosmetics. Her lips silently waving calls for help as her lone figure drowns in loss. Lying on the floor, with music inanely cheering about being on top of the world or expressing the depths of lost love.
Finally, the performer leaves us for the precipice of the stage front, facing an audience-less auditorium. It could be the end. It should be, in place of the battery of video images on screens large and small that suddenly launch a techno-avalanche sense-blinding eyes and ears.
Only the image of the bare hilltop where her tent had been pitched makes its bleak point. Nothing else in this blizzard approaches the moving moment when, from her own experience, the performer re-uses the words her lecturer had reported as final indication of approaching death.
However devastated the life behind that lecturer's professional cheer, hope remains in the human, in Arnfield's persona with its containment of effervescence and reflection. With such a fine performer, why bury her in all this technology - because it's there?
Performer: Jane Arnfield
Director: Richard Gregory
Designer: Simon Banham
Lighting: Mike Brookes
Video: John Alder, Alex Elliott
Composer/Video editor: John Alder
Choreographer: Jane Mason
Dramaturg: Duska Radosavljevic
2004-01-11 18:07:33