SOLID BLUE: Talking Birds, Coventry, till 17 August

SOLID BLUE: Nick Walker
Talking Birds at Whitefriars, Coventry
Tickets: 024 7655 3055
Company info: www.talkingbirds.co.uk
Runs: 1h 15m, no interval, till 17 August
Performances: 19.30
Review: Rod Dungate, 13 August 2002

Haunting dream or fragmented nightmare – a highly charged atmosphere in a beautiful setting: a unique experience.
It is inspiring sometimes to see performances in spaces that aren't regular theatre spaces – in spaces where the venue is itself, in a way, a member of the performing company. So it is with Whitefriars, a former monastery, and Coventry based Talking Birds' SOLID BLUE. There is a perfect harmony between space and performance: the event is as much a celebration of a place as it is of an idea. The result is both disturbing and thrilling – an exciting buzz deep in your guts.

The beautiful old monastery sits in the middle of a large piece of wild ground: only a few feet away cars hurtle round Coventry's elevated and extremely ugly ring-road. The very old and the new are unceremoniously slammed against each other and left to get on with it.

SOLID BLUE is a show trial, it has the quality of a fragmented dream: it exists outside time but is both old and new. Sitting in the monastery's ancient gallery watching Talking Birds I was made to feel at ease with the juxtaposition of ring-road and religious building. Like the play, we ourselves and our artefacts are fleeting images.

In the long gallery space the nightmarish trial is acted out. Case 71 can't be heard because case 1395 is appealed: but the appeal can't properly be heard because a vital piece of evidence can't be accepted for fear it will contaminate the other case, in which it is central.

Actors move in and out of pools of light, their feet echoing on wooden floor – the characters disappear in the murky gloom. Characters mount staircases which are trundled round the acting-space, they pop in and out of moveable doors. The charged atmosphere is an infectious mixture of farce, expressionism, film noir. Writer-director Nick Walker has merged the parts into a satisfying whole – his script moves from the banal to the bizarre, from the cataclysmic to the comic and allows much space for the performance to breathe.

Maxine Finch (The Woman) demonstrates great comic skill: she combines, too, toughness and vulnerability. Patrice Naiambana's Clerk is superb – Naiambana has a haunting directness, he is both dotty and terrifying, hypnotically sweeping from one extreme to another while scurrying about like a bookish monk from a far-gone age.

Don't simply follow the narrative – experience the whole event.

Clerk of the Court: Patrice Naiambana
The Woman: Maxine Finch
Samuel Ives: Graeme Rose

Writer and Director: Nick Walker
Set, Costume, Lighting Design: Janet Vaughan
Music and Sound Design: Derek Nisbet

2002-08-14 08:54:10