THE LIE OF THE LAND To 2 May.
London.
THE LIE OF THE LAND
by Torben Betts.
Arcola Theatre (Arcola 2) 27 Arcola Street E8 2DJ To 2 May 2009.
Mon-Sat 8.15pm Mat 18, 25 April, 2 May 3.30pm.
Runs 1hr 15min No interval.
TICKETS: 020 7503 1646.
www.arcolatheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 9 April.
A playwright with a rare vision of the particular in the apparently general.
This ought to be irritating. Another example of that favoured fringe-theatre location, the environmental near-apocalypse, it has an anonymous he and she (usual indicator of half-baked weariness) who have left the weather-savaged city of a globally-warmed land battled-over by gangs and government striker-planes. Their new hill-top home, once a farm, is at the rising sea’s edge. Their patterned, repeated-phrase speech constitutes the modern revival of verse drama that daren’t (for fear of cultural preciosity) speak its name.
Yet this is Torben Betts, who’s never better than when savage and general. What might once have been an idyllic dropping-out from the rat-race becomes here a refusal to climb a target-runged ladder. High hopes are the icing over desperation in a temporary paradise, revealing the self-deception hidden in the title, as the huge knocks at the door that eventually mix with the swirling winds and tides of Steve Mayo’s insistent sound-scape make threateningly clear.
It’s also no Eden, and can’t be. One reason’s social; this politely-toned daughter of smart London, and a West Midlander from Socialist stock find class differences emerge in their two-person society. He burns his business-suit, sign of a busy modern urban society’s classless surface, she turns against a bookish background in the search for life at first-hand.
Her desire for a child, his to leave a mark on the world, their subsequent inability to be apart or together satisfactorily recall plays by Bernard Shaw and Jean-Paul Sartre, and there are other echoes. But Betts’ makes their world, with its fears overgrowing early hopes, his own.
Their speech, graven in brief phrases contrasted by occasional cantabiles, have an energy often grounded in the natural repetition of thoughts or ideas – at all times these minds are working; words are plentiful, but none are wasted.
Emily Bowker gives full expression to her politely-bred desires and anxieties, Chris Harper only occasionally (and perhaps as a one-off) loses energy; elsewhere he too makes the character’s predicament clear in Adam Barnard’s production, which, aptly, hammers Betts' script vigorously home, displaying a world where this relationship, for all its tensions, is the last thing not yet collapsed.
Cast: Emily Bowker, Chris Harper
Voiceovers: Matthew Kelly, Kathy Hipperson, Paul O’Mahony, Jeany Spark.
Director: Adam Barnard.
Designers: The Company, Kelly Vassie.
Lighting: Mikey Robertson.
Sound: Steve Mayo.
Video titles: Oscar Sharp.
Associate director: Eleanor Rhode.
2009-04-10 17:26:26