Fevered Sleep are famously experimental in their approach to making work, with their output spanning a dizzying array of forms, featuring audio installation, interactivity with children and adults, and even a live horse. Above Me The Wide Blue Sky does not disappoint in this respect: it is difficult to classify and complex as an experience in real time.
Ali Beale’s beautiful design envelops us, with clouds growing and traversing across screens placed high up on every side. The ground is a loose pavement of chalk blocks, interspersed with slender, bending lamps whose white lights dim and glow in myriad changing sequences. The design encapsulates a key theme of the piece – the detailed translation of the natural world into deliberately artificial form. Those chalk blocks are both roughly hewn and all cut to exactly the same dimensions; the lanterns suggest the organic – like flowers on stems – but emphasise their theatricality with abrupt blackouts and flashes up and down.
We are initially invited to experience the space as an installation, giving us time to enjoy the sky, the lighting and the gentle atmosphere created by the low, artificial hum of Jamie McCarthy and Charles Webber’s sound design (also some slightly uncertain reel-to-reel styled sea footage on tiny upturned chalk ‘screens’). It’s soothing, evocative and strange. The entrance of the performer (Laura Cubitt) and her rather anxious looking dog (who she settles in a bed onstage) prompts a shift in expectation and this is where the piece runs into difficulties. Using deliberately clear and simple language Cubitt attempts to conjure fleeting images of the natural world and of people in nature, engaged in activities sometimes bucolic (making love in the sand-dunes), and at other times unsettling (rabbits clustered together with oddly swollen eyes). The imagery is often arresting and gradually builds into a sort of elegy for a world slipping between our fingers.
But the form is also alienating, perhaps deliberately so, and whilst the production’s intellectual credentials are beyond reproach (as established in the extensive programme notes) its formal patterning and stubborn refusal to slide into anything resembling a narrative, even briefly, feels disengaging. The context is certainly theatrical, as we sit in raked ranks in the round and the Young Vic’s bar buzzes outside, but the show attempts to subvert this engagement. Its long lists, lopping structure and cycles of sound and light require, and gradually encourage, a different type of attention: for some this may be meditative, for others frustrating. Cubitt works hard to vivify each simple image with subtle variation in tone and physicality, but the repetitive patterning of the text (every sentence in the first two thirds of the show begins ‘There is’) feels like hard work for her and for us and there are moments where this quality seems unhelpfully to undercut the more delicately shifting tones of sound and light. Much thought and skill has gone into Above Me The Wide Blue Sky and I felt ready to be transported by its vision of our changing world. But in the end it reached me intellectually but left me reaching for emotional theatrical transcendence.