TONE CLUSTERS. To 27 August.

Edinburgh

TONE CLUSTERS
by Joyce Carol Oates

Traverse 3 To 27 August 2006
Tue-Sun various times
Runs 55min No interval

TICKETS: 0131 228 1404
www.traverse.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 17 August

Devastated lives under the spotlight.
This short play by American Joyce Carol Oates (best known for her novels) is a focused examination of a nightmare situation, played out with a mix of the human and technological that’s key to such subjects nowadays. Both the writing and performances have a withheld, low-key intensity that powerfully suggest restrained emotions within the middle-class American wife and husband we see and the unseen TV interviewer probing them with increasingly pointed questions.

The interview’s a type any politician would recognise; seemingly sympathetic or easily factual questions lulling interviewees till the killer questions get introduced at a vulnerable point. ‘Killer’ questions here takes on a double meaning, as a couple of upright New Jersey citizens in their safe identikit house find themselves involved with a murder. A zoom-in travelling camera homes in on their place among serried lookalike rows, before travelling to the cellar chalkmarks indicating where a teenage girl’s body was found.

Their son is prime suspect, but despite his conviction both parents remain certain he is innocent. As the TV tribunal closes in on them their certainty never breaks. Though both performances indicate in delayed answers where the difficulties lie, and the questions for which they have no prepared answers.

It’s a mark of their society and way of life that it’s husband more often than wife who answers first. As they face the questions, but have visual images and graphics flash behind them, as the tape develops problems, the gap between media attention and personal experience becomes clearer.

Two kinds of impersonality emerge. That of the prepared interviewer, calm even in dealing with technical hitches, and the interviewees putting on a public face for a shattering situation to which they are having to daily acclimatise themselves. The possibilities of self-deception, the clinging to a previous, comprehensible way of life on one side, the responsibility of the media on the other are explored through this piece’s single, concentrated focus. Neither script nor production attempts overt authorial comment; Neil Doherty’s production (from Glasgow’s Arches Theatre Company) lets both people and technology speak, forcefully, for themselves.

Cast details unavailable

Director: Neil Doherty
Designer: Kirsty MacKay
Digital Images/Visuals: Once Were Farmers, David Bernard/Pointless Creations

2006-08-23 12:20:56