‘Have you used a GPS system before?’ asks the steward, handing me a smartphone and a pair of headphones. Alarm bells ring: I never have much luck with Google Maps. ‘Me’ is me, she explains, and there’s a white dotted line to follow. When circles show up on the screen, I’m to move towards them to locate the sound recordings.
And thus I find myself in a field full of bemused cows, which I need to cross to reach the small copse in which the recordings are located. Being nervous of cows, I develop a strange looped cow-avoidance walking pattern, which throws the GPS into overdrive as it tries to realign me with the dotted line. It’s not a good start, and it’s downhill from there on in.
On my headphones is a pretty average electronic soundscape (by Chris Clark of Warped Records – I’m a great fan of Warped, but what I’m hearing isn’t particularly inspiring), interspersed with verbatim soundbites about a ‘disappeared’ person that pop into your headphones when you and the GPS system coincide at a given spot. The absent character at the heart of the piece is a real person: Newry man Seamus Ruddy, who went missing in a wood in France almost thirty years ago – killed (it is claimed) by the Irish National Liberation Army, a breakaway group from the Provisional IRA. The words are those of Seamus’ sister Anne Morgan, although spoken by an actor (Amanda Jones). I manage to locate two recordings out of a possible six or so, and also get to hear an introductory text that pops up as I cross the field. I understand that I am supposed to receive this as a fragmented narrative, but the combination of the minimalism of the texts, the imbalance of sound levels of texts and soundscape, and the fact that I only locate some of the spots, means that I come away feeling I’ve learnt very little about this man, and the devastating effect of his disappearance. It is immensely frustrating. There was more to learn about Seamus from the A4 sheet of photocopied paper we are given afterwards than is manifest in the show itself.
We are, I suppose, placed in a wood in a field because Seamus disappeared in a wood (in France, 28 years ago) but, for goodness sake, writing and theatre exist to evoke a sense of place – we don’t have to be physically placed in a woodland to understand Seamus’s plight, and that of the family who have never found his remains. The source material (email correspondence transposed into spoken word) might have made a good sound piece in someone else’s hands, and had that been the case it would have made more sense to me as an experimental radio play, broadcast on Radio 3.
I suppose you could argue that being alone in the woods, frustratedly searching for something you can’t locate, is a metaphor for the plight of the lost man’s family, but I wasn’t even alone – the small copse was occupied by three other people whilst I was there, and at least two of them were having as many problems as me with locating the sound recordings. I spent a lot of time standing still, waiting for the system to catch up, and often it froze completely for many minutes. After 30 minutes it cuts out, sending a ‘your time is up’ message.
So the fundamental problems with the piece could be summed up as: technology that isn’t yet up to the job; a nebulous connection between site chosen and the core content of the piece (the story of Seamus Ruddy); a less than inspiring soundscape by the collaborating musician; a desire to tell an important story that gets strangled by the chosen means of communicating that story.
The worthiness of the cause – promoting the plight of the ‘disappeared’ – should mean that the art that attempts to address it really is worthy of that cause, and this sadly isn’t. Seamus deserves better.