LONGWAVE. To 30 June.

London

LONGWAVE
by Chris Goode

Lyric Studio Hammersmith To 30 June 2007
Mon-Sat 8pm
Runs 1hr 25min No interval

TICKETS: 08700 500511
www.lyric.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 23 June

Watch closely and be fascinated.
Cabin fever; the loneliness of the long-distance scientific explorer, the emerging impact of personality on an impersonal quest; the Marie Celeste-style mystery of the missing. All are suggested in Chris Goode’s piece for Signal to Noise, with a skill suggesting a truly theatrical mind.

The setting’s a roofed cabin in an undefined location. Max and Herman enter in protective suits, soon removed as they come to terms with what will be their base for the foreseeable future (in effect, the extent of the show). There’s an old-style wireless (the sort that used to send whoops and cries of interference as the dial was moved between stations). ‘Hilversum’ is sure to be written on it somewhere, recalling days before the certainty of fibre optics and global positioning, when radio waves were risky things.

The wireless announces that here on long-wave there’s to be a radio-play called “Longwave”. The irony is Goode’s creation is anything but a radio-play. There’s not a word spoken live on stage, while all the interest is in the characters’ actions, minutely-observed whether they’re routine or unique.

The mundane ones include dividing the shared space into two private living-areas by a thin curtain. They can expose the problem of matching lifestyles to confined living-quarters: one person wants to play the mouth-organ, the other listen to the radio. Some activities seem there for their theatrical inventiveness, any relation to the unspecified activity of the characters coincidental; like a long balletic sequence involving a created scientific device with graph-drawing arms, jointly manipulated, to music that appears from nowhere within the action.

But what’s real or not in narrative terms scarcely matters. The childlike drawings each character has around his lift-down bed are images of home for those confined far-away, while the blank white outside into which Max disappears, leaving an enigmatic message (“It is just as I feared” – written before his departure, of course) and into which his colleague Herman finally vanishes, called by Max’s voice over the radio, exists in a world of associations, which give the appearance of cohesion without resolution, except through the slow progression of events themselves.

Max: Tom Lyall
Herman: Jamie Wood

Director/Sound: Chris Goode
Designer: Janet Bird
Lighting: Guy Dickens

2007-06-24 21:57:08