What is curious about The Bear is the way it creeps up on you – how you think it’s about one thing and halfway through you start to realise that it’s really about something else entirely.
The story goes that Angela was a solicitor’s clerk, working on a murder case. On her own one day with the suspect, he tells her that the murder was committed not by him, but by a bear. What follows is the story of Angela’s pursuit of the possibility of a murderous bear.
Based on a short story co-written by Angela Clerkin and Improbable co-founder Lee Simpson, who also directs the show, The Bear begins with Clerkin explaining that she is going to be playing herself, recounting an episode that happened to her a few years ago. It’s a complicated thing, playing yourself playing yourself… and Clerkin seems intentionally stilted and detached, so that from the beginning the verity of the storytelling is in question. The first few scenes of the show intersperse explanation with storytelling and some pastiche ‘noir thriller’ scenes (seedy orange light, cigarette, New Yorkian voiceover) that, though fun, are sketches rather than portraits. All very postmodern.
About halfway through Guy Dartnell, who plays all the other characters in the show and helped devise the piece, performs a New Orleans jazz-style Bear song in an incredibly deep growly voice, and I realise I’ve been completely won over by The Bear, and find myself disconcertingly interested in bear-related facts and statistics.
There is a real ‘bear’ feeling, occasionally – something alive, muscled, musky is lurking in the shadows at the back of this performance. Brown fur works its way into the Rae Smith’s subtle design more and more as the show progresses: Dartnell’s evocative Irish Aunt Gloria in her shabby old fur coat, curtains in a karaoke bar before Angela sings a cabaret song that deals flippantly with domestic murder. When Angela describes having tripped on some gravel after a very drunken row with another potential bear-spotter, and how she catches sight of a flash of fur, hears a deep growl, the tension in the room is palpable.
The murderous bear narrative is flipped on its head at some point along the way, becoming something far more abstract, engaging and raw. Though it took a while to get going, by the end of The Bear I am nearly in tears. On the way home, a piece of street art depicting a growling bear catches my eye and I double take, realising that I am worried that I too will have to fight a bear, one of these days.