THE TIME OF THE TORTOISE. To 15 July.

London

THE TIME OF THE TORTOISE
by Kerstin Specht translated by Rachael McGill

Theatre 503 Latchmere Pub 503 Battersea Park Road SW11 3BW To 15 July 2006
Tue-Sat 8pm Sun 5pm
Runs 55min No interval

TICKETS: 020 7978 7040
www.theatre503.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 2 July

Tough concentrated drama.
Both Kerstin Specht’s central characters, Ali and Sami, are dead. They had been lovers, one following the other across countries, making them dead aliens, laid out on rough-piled boards while a smartly black-clad trio of Euro-Norns hover in the background, occasionally arranging plastic sheeting over them, emphasising the 2 men’s otherness.

Though they speak, and argue, in death, neither can leave their wooden deathbeds. Yet even here they’re unequal, Sami being buggered by Ali’s one friend as he lies, besides having a woman lover and a mother who’s trekked across heated, tiring distances to see his body (forcibly represented by Imogen Smith’s long-unexplained character tramping on-the-spot at the rear of the stage).

Unlike the tortoise, these dead men had no home to take with them. Economic and emotional searchings led them to death in places where they were marked out as different by physical features and racial origin.

Specht’s play is like the lives it suggests for people in Ali and Sami’s situation, nasty, brutish and short. Though nastiness is not meant to describe the play as much as the view of life its gnomic, alienating atmosphere creates, with dramatic elements assembled gruellingly slowly, the few flickers of human warmth being expressed through loss and grief.

The playing is adequate, and Elgiva Field’s production somewhat more than that. Played with a stately deliberation, suggesting an element of the ritual that surrounds nearly all death, using the Chorus’s often silent presence as an almost subliminal darkness against which the dead men’s emotions, and those of the people who knew them, are played out, it presents a clear contrast between the individual significance of lives and their smallness on a wider-world canvas. It’s a reminder that, despite jet planes, internet and TV, the world has never been less a global village.

That’s a sense enforced by Rosemary Flagg’s set, simultaneously creating huddle and a sense of space, allowing distance, and closeness when characters gather round one of the ad hoc catafalques on 503’s small stage. This isn’t an easy play, or production, but it’s one which, once seen, is hard to ignore.

Woman: Lara Agar-Stoby
Chorus: Alice Brickwood, Lisa Carne, Tamsyn Challenger
Ali: William El-Gardi
Sami: Harry Kent
Mother: Imogen Smith
Ulu: Sidney Smith

Director: Elgiva Field
Designer: Rosemary Flagg
Lighting: Anna Watson
Sound: Sarah Weltman

2006-07-06 09:08:13