THE POWERBOOK. To 4 June.
National Theatre
THE POWERBOOK
devised by Jeanette Winterson, Deborah Warner and Fiona Shaw from a novel by Jeanette Winterson
Lyttelton Theatre To 4 June 2002
Mon-Sat 9.15pm Mat Sat 5.30pm
Runs 1hr 40min No interval
TICKETS 020 7452 3000
Review Timothy Ramsden 30 May
Love narratives gradually take hold in a techno-heavy staging.Significantly changed, if not quite transformed, the stately Lyttelton Theatre takes on the look of an enlarged arts centre for this experimental summer season. A single bank of seats rising immediately from stage level replaces the raised stage, stalls and circle.
Watching the first of five offerings here, a co-production with France's Theatre National de Chaillot, and asking whether this was a good use of the time and space, I kept swinging indecisively, 'No – Yes – No – Yes', till the curtain would have come down, had this not been an experimental production.
Experimental for the National, that is. It's a matter of each individual's theatre experiences, whether a show like The Powerbook is surprisingly offbeat or the day before yesterday's experiment defrosting from the freezer.
From the moment Fiona Shaw's writer-character descends a long ladder in strangely medieval seeming garb, hooked to her laptop, looking like an online Joan of Arc, it's clear this is the key performance of the leading trio. Pauline Lynch provides fine comic energy in a few parts the others don't want. But Saffron Burrows is strangely neutral. Apart from a catwalk moment (perhaps included because she does catwalk moments well) she's a fidgety presence, with static facial expressions and generalised emotion in the voice.
Whereas Shaw can mesmerise merely standing at the back of the stage, book in hand. As she does when about to read an account of the fatal 1924 Mallory ascent of Everest. Why a story about Everest? Because it's there – a giant projection of the tallest story in the virtual worlds of love which make up the piece. And it's soon clear the only thing beginning to rival Shaw's magnetic presence is the technology: film of Paris, slow moving figures setting a time dimension separate from day-to-day chronology as they cross the Seine behind a scene in which lovers-to-be meet up. And, elsewhere, an e-world as magically illusory as the old smoke and mirrors.
Sometimes it clarifies, sometimes obscures. But it can't deny the truth Shaw demonstrates, one spelled out upstairs, in the opening words of the National's Bacchai: that theatre, at root, is about an empty space, an actor and an audience.
Cast:
Fiona Shaw, Saffron Burrows, Pauline Lynch, Anthony Mark Barrow, George Eggay, Tim Funnell, Stephen O' Toole, Jack Pierce, Guy Rhys, Davina Silver, Daniel Tyrrell
Director: Deborah Warner
Designer/Video: Tom Pie
Lighting: Jean Kalman
Sound: Christopher Shutt
Music: Mel Mercier
Costume: Nicky Gillibrand
Company voice work: Patsy Rodenburg
2002-06-01 00:34:45