SILVERLAND. To 10 June.
London
SILVERLAND
by Benjamin Davis
Arcola Theatre 27 Arcola Street E8 2DJ To 10 June 2006
Mon-Sat 8pm Mat Sat 3pm
Runs 2hr 15min One interval
TICKETS: 020 7503 1646
www.arcolatheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 19 May
Ambitious vision painted through multiple story-lines.
I recently saw a perfect play that left me cold and unconvinced. Here is an imperfect piece which, despite any shortcomings (possibly attendant upon its development through devising to scripting) is gripping in its ambition. It’s very much a London drama, though with wider resonances, which explains one character stuck in remote Scotland. Giving itself the freedom of being set in the “near future” (2012 London Olympics year is just around the corner), it feels very current.
Though Silverland had an initial reading elsewhere, it might be made for the Arcola. It’s not only the several Dalston references; the urban desolation where its multiple stories criss-cross finds the perfect space in a traverse setting spread along the theatre’s length.
Though it’s large-scale in subject and staging, only a very few moments involve more than 2 characters; in one case 3, while in the sole group scene most characters are frozen figures in the temperature down-turn of intensified global warming. East London’s newly smartened on the surface for the Olympics, but water’s running low and business plans to import it from a moon of Jupiter. While water’s a renewed business proposition, the new landscape’s become a profitable photo-art phenomenon.
Meanwhile, up north waves crash and kill, and the weather rolls down to the Thames Estuary. An undeveloped, wire-mesh and rubble wasteland is home to an assertive prostitute who takes on a mystic role, as, very differently, do a pair of youths waking miles from the rave they’d been at. There’s a crashed car, its role emerging late on. We’re left to find out way through events as the characters must do themselves.
Unsurprisingly, the one who starts out most confident is a stock-weaving banker. And it’s his solid world that comes most undone, rivalled by the relationship between an architect and a flashy photographer. Eventually the icy river cracks, doomlike, under the play’s characters.
Acting may be uneven too, but there’s good work from Tim Steed as a banker increasingly at sea and Morven Macbeth’s bereft Scottish wife, with mostly solid work around. Combining realism and a poetic dimension finally encapsulated in a mock-Shakespearean lyric, this play’s ambition far outweighs any flaws.
Cleo: Emmanuella Cole
David: Hugo Cox
Mikey: Sam Crane
Dario: Cary Crankson
Sarah: Sophie Hunter
Caroline: Morven Macbeth
Stockers: Tim Steed
Gabriel: Gideon Turner
Director: Dylan Lowthian
Designer: James Cotterill
Lighting: Mark Doubleday
Sound: Albi Gravener
Projection: Finn Ross for Mesmer
Photographs: Charlie Koolhaas
2006-05-21 21:51:30