IMAGINE DROWNING To 11 October.

London.

IMAGINE DROWNING
by Terry Johnson.

Rosemary Branch Theatre 2 Shepperton Road N1 3DT To 11 October 2009.
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Sun 2.30pm.
Runs 2hr 20min One interval.

TICKETS: 020 7704 6665.
www.rosemarybranch.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 4 October.

Life, news and protozoic slime.
Run through a list of Terry Johnson’s best-known plays and there’ll be a cast of famous characters, or their imitators: Einstein, Monroe, Hitchcock, Sid James, Kenneth Williams, Benny Hill. Oh, and Barbara Windsor.

Not in this 1991 dream-play. True to title, more than one character receives a brief dunking on the Cumbrian coast. And there’s pursuit of a kind of celebrity. One character makes grisly amateur films, and another, a visiting journalist, comes searching for a story.

But the atmosphere’s one of seclusion. Though she takes journalist David in, and subsequently his wife Jane, guest-house keeper Brenda has her own world, with her macabre-minded son, aggressively-mannered cockatoo, secretive hamster and other life-forms dotted around – prominent in Naomi Taylor’s design is an illuminated, branch-filled fish-tank.

With references to Sellafield (as Windscale nuclear power station was renamed to clean-up its image if not necessarily its detritus) and an unidentified former American astronaut on the beach, this is a world of the remote, bringing characters together with seeming logic but ultimate, dream-like inexplicability.

That’s reflected in the fish-like movement of the act openings. Rolling on the floor at first, standing then collapsing after the interval, it’s as if the whole of life comes under question. Throughout, characters leave through the Rosemary Branch’s stepped auditorium only to have someone else return in their place as the action slips between Jane’s visit in pursuit of David and David’s in pursuit of a scoop.

It’s lifelike and dreamlike both. The big demonstration David thinks he’ll find turns out a one-man protest from wheelchair-bound Tom. He refuses editorial instructions to zoom off elsewhere, having a story filed remotely. That too turns-out a non-starter. Meanwhile, he comes across a different story he didn’t expect.

Johnson said Imagine Drowning is “difficult to describe…a sort of dreamplay about the pain we’re all immersed in”. Such a play’s going to be difficult to produce too, and Ed Bartram’s production for Waxwings Theatre covers the surface action well, though without establishing a consistent dream-play sense. Still, it serves well in reminding of another aspect of Johnson’s work from its more familiar faces.

Jane: Stephanie Goodfellow.
David: Tom Harris.
Brenda: Joanne Hildon.
Buddy: Rory McCallum.
Tom: Simon Norbury.
Sam: John Shortell.

Director: Ed Bartram.
Designer/Costume: Naomi Taylor.
Lighting: Jonathan Goldstone.
Sound: Nina Welch.
Choreographer: Bettina Strickler.
Voice coach: Emma Vane.
Assistant director: Chris O’Donnell.

2009-10-05 10:12:24