Vivid theatrical depiction of spiritual trauma

Unreachable by Anthony Neilson at the Royal Court Theatre

This intriguing play, finely directed by the author, is one of the more vibrant theatrical offerings now on in the West End. It has the aura of an unfinished work, as if it is being remade anew at each performance, the creative team grasping after something always just out of reach, paradigmatic of itself. And that is part of its charm.

It's had very mixed reviews but, to be honest, I thought the play was ground-breaking in its sincere attempt to map the spiritual trauma and dilemma of its characters. Some of our major playwrights are attempting this lately in subtle, almost unobtrusive ways. Caryl Churchill did it most intelligently in Love and Information.

The play plots the impact of a film director, Maxim (Matt Smith), on his creative colleagues as he stalls the making of his apocalyptic masterpiece by searching for the perfect light in which to shoot it on location. It's obvious that the perfect light has layers of obscure meaning but Neilson introduces this concept elegantly, not forcing the metaphor. Maxim is in conflict with his lead actor Natasha (Tamara Lawrence) and his producer Anastasia (Amanda Drew) who are themselves searching for greater meaning within circumference of their working lives. As are an intrusively snooping deaf financier (Genevieve Barr) and Max's deeply frustrated cinematographer (Richard Pyros).

Into this (wickedly funny) fraught human ambience erupts, literally from a suitcase, East European actor Ivan 'The Brute', played with virtuosic comic elan by Jonjo O'Neill. This dynamic, absurd character pulls the play in several directions at once, allowing a deeper spiritual energy to subvert and disrupt the narrative. Neilson's imaginative and moral courage to allow this bricolage to happen, listening to the promptings and ideas of his actors,  means that, at least at the beginning of the run, he is fine-tuning the script before every performance. This ensures the play's excitement.

Several critics have decided that the play is no more than a first draft but I would argue that it is in fact always a new draft in the making. In this way Neilson allows small, random spiritual moments to leach through the text, much as they do in real life. The play values these and keeps us entertained, fascinated and constantly amused with the kind of exuberant theatrical language not heard on the London stage since the comedies of Christopher Fry.

It is not all haphazard spiritual searching: themes of the politics of personal relationships within a work-setting and the dehumanising effect of artistic creation are there too. Matt Smith is convincingly narcissistic and pained as Maxim, holding the wilder excesses of Neilson's dramaturgy together, despite the occasional corpsing and line forgetfulness of the cast. Each is somehow allowed their moment of awakening. The director has his vision and the final tableau brings it all alive in a startling theatrical picture.

Murder in the Cathedral at the Temple Church

Joe Harmston's production of T.S. Eliot's verse drama Murder in the Cathedral enthralled a capacity audience on Saturday night, January 31, at the Temple Church. Any argument that this eighty year-old verse drama might present today as an obsolete dramatic form was dispelled completely by this vibrant, riveting and fluent production.

Philip Franks brought an uncompromising contemporary authority to Archbishop Thomas Becket who has challenged his king, Henry 11, in the England of 1170, and is waiting the consequences of his action. His agonised spiritual journey is mirrored and embodied by the Chorus of the Women of Canterbury, here played mainly by members of the legal profession. If this particular Chorus seemed a little uncertain in the opening scenes it gathered in anguished intensity as the play progressed.

A rapt audience savoured every word of the remarkably chthonic and engaging poetic language as the play encompasses various political and religious viewpoints with a startlingly playful energy. The playfulness is there in the recycling of imagery from earlier work but making this imagery new and potent in a different setting. It is there is the clever astute tripartite structure, even in the deeply moving Christmas sermon delivered here from a looming illuminated pulpit in almost complete darkness. It is there in the final section of the play where the knights justify their murderous deed in the humorous, throwaway terms of celebrity-speak and darkly reminiscent of the language of the Nuremberg trials.

This is a great play and should be performed more often. An excellent cast responded beautifully to the nuances and subtleties of Harmston's direction. Atmospheric lighting by John Harris, an evocative sound score by Matthew Bugg and an elegant traverse set by Simon Scullion contributed to the mesmerising effect. Amazing to think that the National Theatre has not picked up on this or that any of the other subsided theatres are not celebrating any work of one of the twentieth century's greatest dramatists. A transfer to the West End perhaps for Harmston's timely and vivid production?

Second Sacred and Secular Symposium: Goldsmiths, University of London, January 16th 2015.

Delighted to have been provoked into presenting at this unique symposium by Timothy Stacey who, with Panagiotis Pentaris (both PhD candidates at Goldsmiths) organises this annual event.

It's a pleasure to be able to discuss, in a serious setting, the phenomenon of spirituality today in dramatic texts. I'm actually looking at the societal impact of T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral and it's capacity to involve (ensnare?) an audience in its powerful theatre.

My talk is called 'A rain of blood has blinded my eyes: T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral as a discourse on World War Two'.  A provocative title maybe but this play has had a history of provoking academics and audiences into ongoing and multiple interpretations.

It's much more playful than the whodunnit title suggests and every bit as gripping. I will be examining the kind of spirituality evoked in the text with reference to Elisabeth Däumer's remarkable account of the play's reception in postwar Germany and discussing how the spiritual component in the play contributes to any discourse we have on the war and its aftermath.

Observing the First Crocus

A small yellow flame here, a faint purple spark there... Acres of green mud, glazed with brown and black water. Skeletal trees; a gaze of blue sky; mutterings of wind. 'I'm here', it says. 'I'm here and I'm yellow and gold and purple and white... I am the song of Spring. Sing me.'

Vision and Articulation

Preparing for the 2014 Graduate Festival at Goldsmiths, Vision and Articulation, a number of tangential issues arise.

The need for continuing visualisation of my verse drama as the final moments play out in my imagination. In my mind, I am there simultaneously in the stage space with the characters and also in the audience looking, watching, feeling... It always amazes me how much an audience can change and transform as it engages with the play and this has to be taken into account when writing.

The vision of the weather... In London, this morning the weather segues through three seasons: bitterly cold winter; blue-sky spring and sunshine; autumnal darkness and gale-force winds. Kaleidoscopic changes every fifteen minutes. Right now: it's early spring. Daffodils emerge through the earth, bluebells not far behind. Snowdrops, aconites and purple hellebore enjoy the faint warmth of the dazzling low sun.

Articulating the findings of my research. Having just upgraded to PhD level, the challenge is to continue to articulate the vision of new insights into dramatic texts i.e. where and how spirituality may be found in them and to articulate this further in two practice-as-research dramas. It's fun and it's exciting and it's very hard painstaking work and I can't say any more here except to articulate - obliquely - the challenge. All energies must go into embodying the vision.

Missing Dates

Dates which go astray, or appear wrong, or are given mistakenly: so that we never quite know where we are or are meant to be...Missing dates...

The death of a friend which is reported unbidden: a date unnoticed, we were doing other things, never thought of it at all, but is today's news. Then is yesterday's: food for thought, contemplation, a sense of the mystery of life and time...

Deadlines which, misreported, loom like ghosts, phantoms which never were: no need to be kept, urgency postponed, put on hold, put back a week, or a month, or forever. Until a new date takes its place: shining, pristine, with that challenging smile.

Not the dates we eat, although some are swallowed whole, but the dates we recognise and note, perhaps in a diary, a letter or a sudden email. Plump with promise, then withered with time and disappearing from consciousness like a new tune.

The Snow Spider

Tristan Bates Theatre, London

The Snow Spider, adapted from Jenny Nimmo’s children’s novel by Delyth Jones and James Lark, and presented by the Io Theatre Company, is a ‘total theatre’ concoction, meshing physical theatre, music, song and text effortlessly and imaginatively. Gwyn Griffiths (Joey Hickman) is given a peculiar group of presents on his ninth birthday, each carrying a profound symbolic meaning. The play shows what he encounters as he engages with the deeper implications of each and how his engagement impacts on family and neighbours in this rural community in darkest Wales. Each present is like a portal to another world.

There is magic in the air: his grandmother, Nain (Anne-Marie Piazza, in commanding form) is a teller of tales and a wannabe witch. A running joke is that every spell she casts fails to work. Or does it? Throughout the piece there is the unsettling weaving of the magical within the everyday, in the action as much as in the dialogue. Day to day living is interwoven with archetypal transformative moments and strange visitings.

Gwyn’s kaleidoscope is metaphorical of the play’s structure: shifting patterns merging colourfully into the next. Sometimes the thread of the story gets lost amid all the singing and the musicianship, not to mention rather too many storms for my liking, but the virtuosic ability of the gifted ensemble cast is never in doubt in the clever way they conjure these up through voice, movement and sound.

The snow spider itself seems to be the threshold guardian to that other world where, it seems, Gwyn’s sister Bethan disappeared four years earlier on a mountain walk. The play is a study of the effects of the web of grief on a simple tight-knit community and what might be considered to be a few desperate ways out of it. I was reminded of Synge’s Riders to the Sea at one point but the play has much stronger echoes of J.M. Barrie’s Mary Rose, leitmotifs from Celtic folklore, a dash of African voodoo and even a sprinkling of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Delyth Jones directs a rather sprawling script with finesse and imaginative delicacy and James Lark supplies atmospheric and discordant music. For me, the play would have been even more engaging had there been no interval and a more compact, focused version played through in one act. The ensemble work is faultless and Joey Hickman is a winning and believable Gwyn. Helena Gullan shines as Eirlys who may or may not be Bethan brought back to unearthly life. Philip Benjamin shows much versatility as the Dad and a threatening old-style schoolmaster. The school and playground scenes are hilarious and horribly recognisable. Nearly everyone, I think, plays a musical instrument and Anneke Hodnett on the harp produces some very other-worldly sounds in keeping with the play’s shadow-land of dream and reality.

Designer Florence Hazard has created a cluttered set emblematic of stuff caught up in a spider’s web. It is fascinating to see how the cast deploy every prop as the story unfolds and, indeed, create new ones with what’s on hand. I particularly liked the sparkling snow spider which seems to scuttle here there and everywhere.  Overall, an evening of theatrical magic: innovative and dark.

4 stars

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