NIGHTFALL. To 25 April.

Coventry.

NIGHTFALL
devised, researched and developed by the cast and Sara Jane Bailes, Tara Walsh, Suzie Zara.

The Special Guests.
Runs: 55min No interval.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 25 April at Warwick Arts Centre Studio, Coventry.

Twilight under the microscope from a company with ideas to develop.
Invited to Warwick Arts Centre’s Studio, The Special Guests bring this new show from their Bristol home. Starting with the idea of ‘falling’ the company alighted on nightfall as a theme. And, since the real thing’s happening outside as they perform, the company send several members out to report by radio on the twilight scene at Warwick University campus.

This two-way communication is played with the self-consciously edged informality that TV and theatre often use when trying to give the public a sense of overlooking a privately-conducted investigation. It doesn’t convince, but that may be the point: that it’s replicating a kind of media conversation that doesn’t convince.

Elsewhere, the four youthful Guests often retain the self-conscious casualness of performers in today’s technically-advanced, non-narrative theatre, especially that which uses theatrical space to conjure with scientific ideas. What’s lacking is any dynamic, as yet, to give the company its own identity within such a performance style.

But development is part of the point of the avant-garde (or ‘cutting edge’ as it’s anglicised these days). And there are certainly theatrical ideas that give the ideas here theatrical interest. A clothes-line is used, first, to identify the three progressive stages of twilight, before having clothes-pegs attached to create a timeline of human crepuscular activities.

Alongside the scientific and sociable – the rational elements of encroaching dark – there’s also the irrational, the gothic. It’s present from the start in wax-dripping candles and bottles, and mixes with a scientific demonstration of the sun being circled by earth (a performer circling with an inflatable globe). Round her goes another performer as the moon. But this moon expresses the long-held human view of the lunar as lunatic, behaving erratically before attacking and binding the earth with rope.

Later, an orgy of gruesomely-masked figures creates a mad dance (movement skills could be the Guests’ next area for development), one continuing with werewolf-snout shaking as others return to human features. The performance, 15 minutes shorter than advertised, ends abruptly, with no sense of summation. But, whatever the piece’s shortfalls, there are certainly glimmerings of theatrical light in this company’s work.

Performers: Matthew Austin, Lucy Gibbs, Pete Phillips, Nina Wyllie.

Lighting: Su Dean.
Associate director: Sara Jane Bailes.

2008-04-28 00:15:30