SHADOW LANGUAGE. To 15 March.
London.
SHADOW LANGUAGE
by Kelly Stuart.
Theatre 503 Latchmere Pub 503 Battersea Park Road SW11 3BW To 15 March 2008.
Tue-Sat 8pm Sun 5pm.
Runs 1hr 50min One interval.
TICKETS: 020 7978 7040.
www.theatrre503.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 9 March.
Americans, rather than innocents, abroad.
Kelly Stuart’s play is the latest at Battersea’s Theatre 503 to roam the world and reflect international issues. Young June arrives in Turkey from Tennessee. A shy churchgoer (who at one point displays a sudden, brief sexuality), she meets fellow-American Tracee. Both are looking for their lovers. Tracee’s aware that references to Kurds, or their language, can be fatal.
Even a local carpet-seller who feels confident about being Kurdish these days clams up at a reference to Kurdistan. Political control is absolute, and June learns it’s not only traders and beggar-children who are insistent on bargaining. Moral positions easy enough in Nashville are impossible to maintain when you want something in Turkey.
A sense of disassociation is increased by language barriers (June’s left out of conversations in Turkish, while the audience benefits from supertitles). And by shadow-puppet scenes, showing a reverse journey from Turkey to America, where the final identity of a votacious wolf is located.
Stuart clearly includes a lot of strands in Shadow Language. But their dramatic language, and what they say in it, remains shadowy. With so many themes: American innocence and ignorance abroad, political tensions in Turkey, the search for lovers, it becomes hard to know how much to focus on each separately, how much they’re meant to be rolling together into some larger picture.
So, churchgoing June talks of the man she’s looking for in such radiant terms, and as going away then returning, he might be the New Testament Christ, implying a larger theme of world beliefs. The eventually revealed source of her money suggests the individual believer going beyond the bounds of organised religion in a personal quest.
But it’s hard to find such larger themes developing through the whole piece. If there is a centre it’s in the co-existence of love and betrayal. Tracee, first seen with sketchpad, aids or hinders June for her own purposes, while the plot veers into arms-smuggling and the clash between personal relationships and political aims. The cast is good, Miranda Foster almost too good, giving Tracee a depth going beyond the rest of Tim Stark’s production.
June: Beverley Longhurst.
Tracee: Miranda Foster.
Child: Nancy Wallinger.
Orhan: Hemi Yeroham.
Bawer: George Georgiu.
Gabriel: Eugene Washington.
Woman/Sosin: Zina Badran.
Murat/Cem: Khalid Laith.
Director: Tim Stark.
Designer: Cordelia Chisholm.
Lighting: Mark Doubleday.
Sound/Music: Duncan Chave.
Projections/Shadow Puppetrs: Chiara Ambrosio.
Shadow Puppets: Xristina Penna.
Dialect coach: Mustafa Gundogdu.
Assistant director: Kane Moore.
2008-03-12 10:56:41