POET NO 7. To 18 March.

London

POET NO 7
by Ben Ellis

Theatre 503 Latchmere Pub 503 Battersea Park Road SW11 To 18 March 2006
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Sun 5pm
Runs 1hr No interval

TICKETS: 020 7978 7040
www.theatre503.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 12 March

Brief, sharp and pointed play in equally sharp production.
It seems a long time since I heard a conversation onstage at 503; recent plays there have mostly used intercut monologues. The form has attractions; characters turn themselves inside out with great immediacy. Yet a dramatist needs particular skill moving story and characters carefully forward, while the form needs to have relevance to the subject matter. On all counts, Australian playwright Ben Ellis succeeds, showing a fractured society where obsessive love of someone, or something – relationships between individuals or nations (when one has the (super) power) - brings disaster.

The 2 women and 2 men here both show contrasts. A librarian in love wears bright feminine clothes, joyously bouncing around the central sofa that’s the only furnishing in this bleak, whited-out world where autumnal leaves litter the floor. A disposal worker at one side wears functional top and trousers.

The contrast’s starker between the men. Business-suited Mark is besotted with, would do anything for, America, yet finds his contact there has enough surveillance to know the personal motive behind Mark’s anti-American slur against his business partner. Mark’s happy to view Australia as the world’s commercial laboratory, delighted to link with the US so his own country’s fruit - literally, he’s talking berries – can be incorporated into Yankee defence technology: life turned into potential death.

Behind him, there’s the possible outcome. In something like a straitjacket, an asylum inmate who mixes madman and political prisoner, talks of the state jailing professors and poets, presumably in an anti-terrorism drive; (bombs have been falling, in the trouble of the last 18 months). Poetry most immediately signifies personal expression, so this society where poets become numbers among the incarcerated has become as oppressively depersonalised as can be imagined.

For all the individual worlds on show here, personal and political obsessions are tied together by phrases that bound instantly from one speaker to another, making it intrguing, yet often impossible, to work out whether there’s any link between two people’s use of identical wording. Tightly directed by Anna Ledwich, each performance is clearly characterised, building a social patchwork in a brief, compelling and strongly-written play.

Ella: Helena Eastman
Gillian: Miriam Lucia
Mark: Patrick Ross
X: Damien Warren-Smith

Director: Anna Ledwich
Designer: Sibylle Wallum
Lighting: Sven Ortel
Sound: Phil Hewitt

2006-03-14 13:28:49