NINE YEARS. To 5 March.
Tour
NINE YEARS
by Lone Twin
Tour to 5 March 2007
Runs 1hr 15min No interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 25 February at bac (studio 2)
All the world really is the stage for these people.
Gregg Whelan and Gary Winters travel anywhere – circling cities on bicycles, walking back and forth across a bridge for 12 hours. They perform to people. They set up a new relationship among audience members (Philippe the solitary waiter is no longer alone). They carry a telegraph pole across a city and discover the shortest way from A to B isn’t a straight line when there are houses and shopping-malls in-between.
What’s it all for? Hard to say from this resume of their last 9 years, but it seems to add to the sum of human happiness, and there are worse things than a stage for the world to be.
There’s also a rant against oppressive indoor work-tedium from Gary (Gregg can let rip too when required). Gary’s protests are a bit of a surprise though. Mostly, he perches over Gregg’s desk, kitted out in cyclist’s gear, smiling benignly at his partner’s words, or video clips of their activities. He’ll contribute passages of fine prose, mostly from other authors, but with Gregg’s name inserted as appropriate. And why shouldn’t he make the classics his own?
Then periodically, this contented-seeming fellow will cross the stage and repeat his enraged howl about indoors life, presumably the one he led, or feared, before setting out on the 9 years of promenading, wheeling events. In the process, tearing a sheet of words from a clipboard, he gathers a clutch of memories that stabilise his life.
Meanwhile, the authoritative-looking Gregg has settled at his litter-strewn desk. You learn a lot more from Gregg than from Gary. Gregg is a guide, Gary a somewhat gnomic commentator.
They exist on the edge of the serious and the comic, at the interlinking of the incredible and the mundane. The factual recounting of their experiences is comic. But with an inextricable layer of sadness.
It’s there in the derelict urban scenery speeding by on video. Or implied in the two hang-gliders they meet, who set off to a mountain-top, only one (the experienced one) being seen afterwards. And it’s stronger for being, as these paradoxically-titled couple are themselves, indefinable.
Cast etc: Gregg Whelan, Gary Winters
Tour:
28 Feb- 1 March Leeds Met Studio Theatre 0113 283 5998 www.leedsmet.ac.uk/arts
3 March Colchester Arts Centre 01206 500900 www.colchesterartscentre.com
5 March University of Chichester 01243 816206 www.chiuni.ac.uk
2007-02-28 08:24:32