WARM. To 15 November.

London.

WARM
by Jon Fosse translated by May-Brit Akerholt.

Theatre 503 The Latchmere Pub 503 Battersea Park Road SW11 3BW To 15 November.
Tue-Sat 7.45pm Sun 5pm.
Runs 55min No interval.

TICKETS: 020 7978 7040.
www.theatre503.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 26 October.

Memories can be made of this.
Two men stand on a bare stage, backed only by a charcoal-like outline of a small house. Each talks about a time when they saw a woman in a black swimsuit. Neither recalls the other’s presence then. A woman in a one-piece black swimsuit appears. She stands between them. Or at a front corner of the stage, looking intensely out. She talks to each separately at length, mentioning having a child with one man, three children with the other.

This lasts 55 minutes. Then the play’s over. I presume the men represent one person at different ages, the play looking at the lost past, regret and the attempt to recover what’s done and gone. Whatever that past, or those pasts, was/were like, the present is a bleak place.

Every notable writer marks out their own territory. After seeing a couple of Norwegian Jon Fosse’s dramas, his seems one of ever-decreasing circles. Is this well done? It certainly has its own remorseless consistency, letting in no cheap chink of light. It might startle or impress someone new to such a style, or leave them perplexed and confused.

For anyone who’s seen such a minimal technique used several times before, there’s room to admire Fosse’s remorseless paring-back to the minimum (though the few moves and the significance of silent characters’ continuing presence on stage don’t suggest the obvious with action-zeroed dramas, i.e. that they are, were, or should be radio plays). Or to feel deja-vu

Warm left me cold. But if its bleak terrain is something you recognise, or a dramatic landscape you’ve been seeking out – and casts filled with such characters as The First Man, The Woman, represent the impersonality of individual existence you appreciate - you may find it hot stuff. Certainly, Simon Usher’s scrupulous production searches every note of its near monotone of desolation – and dramatic desolation can be strangely comforting.

David Hounslow and James Chalmers are constant in their unvarying tone of memory, while Valerie Gogan as the woman in (partial) black with the remembered mark about her thighs both varies and intensifies the sense of beached humanity.

The First Man: David Hounslow.
The Second Man: James Chalmers.
The Woman: Valeie Gogan.

Director: Simon Usher.
Designer: Belle Mundi.
Lighting: Sam Moon.
Assistant director: Hanna Wolf.

2008-10-30 11:41:23