STATE OF EMERGENCY. To 13 December.
London.
STATE OF EMERGENCY
by Falk Richter translated by David Tushingham.
Gate Theatre 11 Pembridge Road W11 3HQ To 13 December 2008.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 3pm.
Captioned 25 Nov.
OPost-show talk 18 Nov.
Runs 1hr 20min No interval.
TICKETS: 020 7229 0706.
www.gatetheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 14 November.
Anxiety in three acts.
It’s quite a reliable rule of theatre never to trust a play where the characters have such names as Woman, Man, Boy. If the author can’t particularise them, how’s an audience to do so? There are exceptions, doubtless, but it takes a certain kind of dramatist to work successfully through such generalisations.
Falk Richter doesn’t seem one of them, on the basis of this play. It isn’t helped by this Gate production coming shortly after Rodrigo Pla’s film La Zona, which had a lot more to say, in not many more minutes than this play takes, about living in the affluent ghetto of a gated community amid the disorder of violence and poverty outside.
Apart from the gated connection, this theatre might have been attracted by the play’s invitation to a new morphing of its compact space, the audience sitting in long rows facing glass panels. Almost everything happens behind these, isolating the actors, just as the characters exist in their little world; it’s quite a relief when they slide a panel aside for the final bow, connecting with us for the first time.
Richter shows that no amount of security can make someone feel safe. The more that’s required, the greater the fear of losing it. Here, Jonathan Cullen’s Man, prone to falling asleep, mouth agape, clearly isn’t keeping up his productivity at work. Loss of earnings threatens family ejection into the wild urban woods outside the apartment.
How terrible that world seems is expressed in the violent jolts of Eleni Parousi’s video images on the wall TV. And the cold, clean lines of Naomi Dawson’s set, with its minimalist brutalism, match the relationship shown here, the love poisoned by fear in Geraldine Alexander’s Woman, who interweaves fear and anger, both emanations of anxiety, as she veers between encouragement and accusation.
Jonathan Cullen’s Man wearily denying there’s any problem, and later James Lamb with their teenage son’s angry impatience, complete a pattern of relationships whose psychological rhythms are perfectly caught in Maria Aberg’s suitably cool production. But the point’s been made long before the play’s three scenes are up.
Woman: Geraldine Alexander.
Man: Jonathan Cullen
Boy: James Lamb
Director: Maria Aberg.
Designer: Naomi Dawson.
Lighting: Neil Austin.
Sound: Carolyn Downing.
Video: Eleni Parousi.
Assistant director: Leonie Kubigsteltig.
2008-11-17 00:53:55