RELOCATED. To 5 July.
London.
RELOCATED
by Anthony Neilson.
Royal Court (Jerwood Theatre Upstairs) To 5 July 2008.
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat Sat 4pm.
Runs 1hr 20min No interval.
TICKETS: 020 7565 5000.
ww.royalcourttheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 21 June.
Intensity and darkness within and without in a disturbing piece.
First it’s disorientation, as we twist towards the audience seating; a suitable initiation, as Anthony Neilson’s play moves through an abstract action based on recent cases involving child abduction and murder.
It’s a dark drama, darkly played behind a large post-box like aperture covered in gauze. Action and audience are confined within a black, low-ceilinged space where only the occasional opened window or fridge door allows a cold and distant light. The effect is unsettling and confining (there is no obvious exit for characters or spectators), as would be any contact with the kind of stories lying behind this emotionally blank world.
Two women are hoovering the floor. Whatever they’re cleaning up, it won’t sort out their lives. The cold, sometimes indistinct tone of an entryphone moves one woman on – no time even to settle the dog. Characters change names, and identity, in the dark, as they eat a cake. Between scenes Chahine Yavroyan’s lighting makes the gauze seem solid. No-one knows what’s happening behind it.
Men seem plausible, or threatening. Unnamed, the horror stories of recent years are suggested, as the women shift around, hardly aware who, let alone where, they are. Anagrams of a male name indicate a killer or abductor can turn up anywhere, unsuspected.
Neilson walks a tightrope. He’s clearly not after factual recounting, as in the Tricycle’s tribunal documentaries. It’s difficult to avoid distorting such material with overlays of sentiment or editorialising, dangers he steers through by the oblique approach and a staging where moments of visceral shock arise from a constant sense of tautness and incomprehension.
Anger erupts, a child is suddenly seen, facts change or seem malleable. Normality is excluded from this dark world of the women who helped the men who committed the deeds for which the usual language is either worn with tabloid moralising or inadequate in its clinical sanitisation.
The near-constant low-decibel talk in this near-yet-far world tightens the apprehension. It’s delivered in a set of perfectly-pitched, high-concentration performances which act like a quiet punch round the head, bounding us into a disturbing world, yet one it’s important to understand.
Cast: Frances Grey, Phil McKee, Stuart McQuarrie, Katie Novak, Jan Pearson, Nicola Walker.
Director: Anthony Neilson.
Designer: Miriam Buether.
Lighting: Chahine Yavroyan.
Sound: Nick Powell.
Assistant director: Annabel Rook.
2008-06-22 17:14:29