It doesn’t get much more intimate than this. A small, informally constructed kitchen set, cast in an otherwise anonymous working space. A small audience squeezed tightly into two rows of benches. In the shadows behind the bench, composer John Harris, armed with a laptop and a DX7, stirs the air and subtly increases the tension with a palette of undulating drones peppered with light, high frequency fizzes. The drone and hiss remain in place albeit shifting in and out of focus throughout this short, intense performance. A man, a woman, and an apple tree. A familiar combination of historic consequence, but the events here take place far from Eden. Jane sits all day in the stifling heat of a shabby home. Her husband, Mac, is increasingly desperate about his work, and, consequently, their future. The setting is in a future where economics have failed, heat is rising and vegetation of any kind is rare. So what, then, to make of a bump in the linoleum flooring that transpires to be a green sapling growing through the floor? Is it real? Do they both see the same thing? Is this a manifestation of Jane’s depression, taking on a hallucinatory tangibility? Is there really any hope to be had from this new growth, or has something gone too far? Originally a play, Zinnie Harris, under commission from the Sound Festival, has boiled the narrative into an intense libretto, and within the irregular undulations of John Harris’s score the dialogue, between two people struggling against an inevitably tragic denouement, drifts from spoken word to song, often in the midst of a single line – and frequently with tragi-comic impact. It is somewhat troubling to observe that the depiction of the future as a hopeless, overheated, poisoned eventuality has grown, in itself, somewhat banal, and there is little here that adds any particularly fresh insight into that sad state of affairs. However, Alan McHugh and Pauline Knowles occupy their characters with a raw and hurt despair that it is impossible not to be moved by the evocation of how a societal carelessness and neglect turns full circle on itself affording the space for individuals to career helplessly towards self-destruction. There really is no way back to the garden.

Sound Production: The Garden

It doesn’t get much more intimate than this. A small, informally constructed kitchen set, cast in an otherwise anonymous working space. A small audience squeezed tightly into two rows of benches. In the shadows behind the bench, composer John Harris, armed with a laptop and a DX7, stirs the air and subtly increases the tension with a palette of undulating drones peppered with light, high frequency fizzes. The drone and hiss remain in place albeit shifting in and out of focus throughout this short, intense performance.  A man, a woman, and an apple tree. A familiar combination of historic consequence, but the events here take place far from Eden.  Jane sits all day in the stifling heat of a shabby home. Her husband, Mac, is increasingly desperate about his work, and, consequently, their future.  The setting is in a future where economics have failed, heat is rising and vegetation of any kind is rare. So what, then, to make of a bump in the linoleum flooring that transpires to be a green sapling growing through the floor?  Is it real? Do they both see the same thing? Is this a manifestation of Jane’s depression, taking on a hallucinatory tangibility? Is there really any hope to be had from this new growth, or has something gone too far?  Originally a play, Zinnie Harris, under commission from the Sound Festival, has boiled the narrative into an intense libretto, and within the irregular undulations of John Harris’s score the dialogue, between two people struggling against an inevitably tragic denouement, drifts from spoken word to song, often in the midst of a single line – and frequently with tragi-comic impact.  It is somewhat troubling to observe that the depiction of the future as a hopeless, overheated, poisoned eventuality has grown, in itself, somewhat banal, and there is little here that adds any particularly fresh insight into that sad state of affairs. However, Alan McHugh and Pauline Knowles occupy their characters with a raw and hurt despair that it is impossible not to be moved by the evocation of how a societal carelessness and neglect turns full circle on itself affording the space for individuals to career helplessly towards self-destruction. There really is no way back to the garden.It doesn’t get much more intimate than this. A small, informally constructed kitchen set, cast in an otherwise anonymous working space. A small audience squeezed tightly into two rows of benches. In the shadows behind the bench, composer John Harris, armed with a laptop and a DX7, stirs the air and subtly increases the tension with a palette of undulating drones peppered with light, high frequency fizzes. The drone and hiss remain in place albeit shifting in and out of focus throughout this short, intense performance.

A man, a woman, and an apple tree. A familiar combination of historic consequence, but the events here take place far from Eden.  Jane sits all day in the stifling heat of a shabby home. Her husband, Mac, is increasingly desperate about his work, and, consequently, their future.

The setting is in a future where economics have failed, heat is rising and vegetation of any kind is rare. So what, then, to make of a bump in the linoleum flooring that transpires to be a green sapling growing through the floor?

Is it real? Do they both see the same thing? Is this a manifestation of Jane’s depression, taking on a hallucinatory tangibility? Is there really any hope to be had from this new growth, or has something gone too far?

Originally a play, Zinnie Harris, under commission from the Sound Festival, has boiled the narrative into an intense libretto, and within the irregular undulations of John Harris’s score the dialogue, between two people struggling against an inevitably tragic denouement, drifts from spoken word to song, often in the midst of a single line – and frequently with tragi-comic impact.

It is somewhat troubling to observe that the depiction of the future as a hopeless, overheated, poisoned eventuality has grown, in itself, somewhat banal, and there is little here that adds any particularly fresh insight into that sad state of affairs. However, Alan McHugh and Pauline Knowles occupy their characters with a raw and hurt despair that it is impossible not to be moved by the evocation of how a societal carelessness and neglect turns full circle on itself affording the space for individuals to career helplessly towards self-destruction. There really is no way back to the garden.

This entry was posted in Reviews and tagged on by .
Avatar

About Michael Begg

Michael Begg is a musician and sound artist based in East Lothian, Scotland, from where he runs his label, Omnempathy, and studio, Captains Quarters. He collaborates regularly on theatre sound design, most notably in an ongoing relationship with with Moscow’s blackSKYwhite, and writes regularly on sound and theatre. This written work has appeared in The Scotsman, The Quietus, Paraphilia, Sound On Sound, Adverse Effect, and in translation for the Polish Soundscape Institute.