THE DYING OF TODAY. To 22 November.
London.
THE DYING OF TODAY
by Howard Barker.
Arcola Theatre (Arcola 2) 27 Arcola Street E8 2DJ To 22 November 2008.
Mon-Sat 8.15pm.
Runs 1hr 20min No interval.
TICKETS 020 7503 1646.
www.arcolatheatre.com
Review: Carole Woddis 22 October.
Believe what you hear on stage, not what you read in the papers.
Howard Barker has always been a controversial figure. Less recognised in his own country than in the rest of the world, last year the Arts Council cut his funding and that of The Wrestling School, the company he set up twenty years ago. Luckily, an anonymous US donor stepped in. The Wrestling School and Barker were reprieved.
Barker has never made it easy on his audiences. He can be obtuse. He won’t compromise his vision of what he thinks theatre should be. And he resists naturalism as much as he rails unfailingly against capitalism. Sometimes, off-puttingly, you can sense a kind of sneering quality. He really will have no truck with populism.
So it is here. Inspired by the Greek Thucydides, The Dying of Today throws us into a very timely cauldron – the making and breaking of bad news. Provocatively, Barker sets to work to dramatise the notion of bad news as a form of enslavement. Hearing it, he suggests, comes as relief for our poor, weak souls.
Whether or not you buy this supposition, Barker’s two-hander, in Gerrard McArthur’s glinting, hell-rimmed production pits a stranger against a barber in a kind of nemesis. The stranger gloats that he has “very bad news” to tell. And like a de Sadeian hero, he glories in the effect his account will have on his listener. Pain and pleasure are very close bedfellows here. A terrible beauty is born.
In the event, however, it is the barber who recounts a shudderingly horrific tale of the massacre of an army and with it the imagined loss of his own son.
Duncan Bell and George Irving are mesmerising, alive to every nuance, Bell all Mephistophelian irony, Irving cathartic grief.
At once a whirlwind of heat and ice, in the end it seemed to me like some baroque metaphor on journalism (Tomas Leipzig’s back wall is festooned with crumpled-up newspapers) - about the news gatherers and those who consume, or are the suffering subjects of, their news.
Make of it what you will, it is, at the least, a disturbing experience. Exactly, I imagine, Barker’s intention.
The Visitor: Duncan Bell.
The Barber: George Irving.
Director: Gerrard McArthur.
Setting: Tomas Leipzig.
Costume: Billie Kaiser.
Lighting: Ace McCarron.
Sound: Paul Bull, Tom Lishman.
2008-10-26 01:16:52