IN THE SOLITUDE OF COTTON FIELDS. To 6 August.

London

IN THE SOLITUDE OF COTTON FIELDS
by Bernard-Marie Koltes

bac (studio 2) To 6 August 2006
Tue-Sat 8.30pm Sun 6.30pm Mat 5 Aug 5pm
Runs 1hr 20min no interval

TICKETS: 020 7223 2223
www.bac.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 30 July

Visuals beat verbals in cerebral play’s revival.
Bernard-Marie Koltes’ 1987 2-hander has been staged in an underground station and a rail-terminal among other places. Harun Morrison (runner-up for the 2006 JMK Award for young directors) has turned bac’s studio into an equivalent, a featureless yet atmospheric urban space where a narrow strip of stage is bounded on 2 long sides by a single row of audience, seated on planks laid over upturned crates.

Visual elements create the urban environment. At one end, in black-and-white, water images run, an urban river or puddle set against stones, occasionally swept; at the other runs a coloured, fast-looping banner display.

What it communicates is unreadable. Fitting enough, as the transaction – or rather, the possibility of a transaction – making up this play is unidentified. It is the nature of human encounters as transactions - inevitable, often unpremeditated - which occupies the dramatic space; the wants and needs of people cast in the roles of buyer and seller

After a preliminary, unnecessary, video loop outside the auditorium, Koltes’ Dealer and Client occupy this dark, uncertain ground. Visually, the show works well; even the contextualising round an implied drugs-scenario gives some useful body to the script’s conceptualising.

Vernon Douglas, Black, hooded, invading surrounding space with arm gestures, patrols and the production’s single violent movement (a sudden lunge down the stage’s length), contrasts Sean Cernow’s white, grey-suited Client, starched white collar reaching awkwardly over his jacket lapel.

Mostly timid in voice and inward in action, collapsing in a self-protective ball at the attack he expects from Dealer’s lunge, this Client eventually acquires more confidence as his role becomes more defined.

Cotton Fields takes a moment's experience and meditates upon its possibilities, enquiring about cause, nature and impact. Behind the environment and the actions, the content of the debate is the governing force. It’s here the production falls. Both performers give the sense of rushing through implications which they haven’t fully digested. There’s far too little differentiation in expression, too little specificity, thereby muffling the sense. We live in an age of physical theatre, but plays in the end it comes down to words, words, words.

Client: Sean Cernow
Dealer: Vernon Douglas

Director: Harun Morrison
Designers: Shonagh Manson, Harun Morrisoln, Helen Walker
Lighting: Pauric Hackett, Harun Morrison
Sound: Joe Bell
Music: John Chantler
Image/Film: Helen Walker
Movement: Jane Langston

2006-07-31 10:28:03