INCHES APART To 6 June.
London.
INCHES APART
Theatre 503 Latchmere Pub 503 Battersea Park Road SW11 3BW To 6 June 2009.
Tue-Sat 7.45pm Sun 5pm.
Runs 1hr 15min No interval.
TICKETS: 020 7978 7040.
www.theartre503.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 24 May.
Not perfect, but different.
Just a wall apart live a young man who’s blown a relationship, returning home and cutting himself off from everyone. And next door, a fit and bright-seeming young woman. But for all the home-gym exercising, she’s unable to leave her flat. Brief attempts have her rushing back to safety. Sexual desire takes the form of fantasies about the Tesco delivery-man.
What distinguishes this tale of double modern urban angst in a group-devised, Old Vic New Voices Theatre503 award-winning piece (based on a concept by Nick Blood and Tom McCall) is the style of its telling. The group is enemy to the individual, and a chorus contribute most of the sounds and voices that close the two in.
On his return from wherever, the choric answer-machine contains jokey, blokey messages, those from work growing more serious as he fails to turn up. When someone visits, the encounter’s like a fight with an intruder.
She snatches the milk that’s delivered to the doorstep as if from enemy territory, while peeping over the balcony brings an aural assault from below. Attempts to escape are frustrated by a fear incarnated in a male line-up who change from apparently obedient attendants to restrain her moves to the door. An attempt at online dating evaporates as the chorus smudge her lipstick.
While she’s sinking into her collection of old films, watching Casablanca in a long-dress and signing the delivery note with the name Bacall, he’s been attempting to replicate his lost love using old clothes and a painted-face balloon, also fighting and then talking with a spider, and sharing his home with a soft-toy cow.
Filled with vigorous, imaginative physicality Inches Apart finally gives a place to words as the two neighbours meet and she tells how her agoraphobia came about. The scene might seem set for a happy ending, but its more inconclusively enigmatic.
Still, it’s easy to see why this is an award-winning piece. It may have a common enough subject for these days, but it’s handled in a theatrically innovative way. It is, as the woman describes herself, not perfect but certainly different.
Cast: Alex Gatehouse, Michael Malarkey, Tom McCall, Sophie Steer, Adam Slynn, Sara Templeman.
Director: Rachel Briscoe.
Designer: Joanna Scotcher.
Lighting: Emma Chapman.
Sound/Music: Richard Hammarton.
Story Consultant: Joel Horwood.
2009-05-25 01:43:38