THE WATERY PART OF THE WORLD. To 12 July.
Tour/London
THE WATERY PART OF THE WORLD
by Mark Espiner adapted from Herman Melville
Sound and Fury theatre company on tour to 31 May 2003
Also playing at Battersea Arts Centre 24 June-12 July 2003
Tue-Sat 8.30pm Sun 6.30pm
TICKETS 020 7223 2223
www.bac.org.uk
Runs 1hr 15min No interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 6 May at Warwick Arts Centre
The aural equivalent of visual theatre makes for an intriguing 75 minutes.Willy Russell's Open University student Rita has a simple solution for the immense staging demands of Ibsen's Peer Gynt. Do it on the radio. Sound and Fury provides an alternative. Do it in the dark. The company name signifies a policy of creating theatre works to be performed in total blackness. Or near-total in this case; a few heads are occasionally pinpointed amid the invisibility.
It's a new genre developed at bac, Battersea's arts centre, which dispatches it as part of the 4-production 'This Way Up' touring season. The audience sits in two blocks, facing each other across a narrow corridor. Above this corridor and on high round the audience blocks are ropes, guidelines for the performers as they move.
There has to be trust from audience members they will not be subject to unannounced, unwanted 'participation' in the vulnerability of the dark a vulnerability that seems, to me, especially keen with the eyes open.
Wherever the eyelids are placed, it's an experience distinct from radio, for actors and audience share the same space. Pre-recorded sounds crashing waves, creaking timbers - come from a separate place (on radio, voices and effects share the space, the audience is separate, receiving them). A live effect paper torn to cast lots takes on an immediacy that fits the situation (the lot being cast is for who's to be sacrificed in an ocean-stranded boat).
Darkness becomes a metaphor for the whaling men, remote in a potentially furious world-apart; its sudden bursts of activity explode around us. Yet, stationed on a front row, I found nothing more involving than the final section, a ship's Captain exerting pistol-point command against near-revolt at the idea of self-preservation of the majority by extermination of a shipmate, a conflict of morality and necessity carried out with tortuous slowness, depicting human revulsion among the killers of whales.
This low-voiced, high-intensity 'scene' comes unencumbered by what would have seemed the visual distractions, or overkill, of visual acting - demonstrating the power of this unexpected theatre form, and the need to have spot-on appropriate material. A telling experience and a gripping show.
Performed by:
Alex Dunbar, Tom Espiner, Simon Snashall, Peter Townsend, Martin Welton
Directors: Mark Espiner, Tom Espiner
Designer: Mark Anstee
Lighting: Simon Macer-Wright
Sound: Gareth Fry
2003-05-08 13:23:09