Author Archives: Beccy Smith

About Beccy Smith

Beccy Smith is a freelance dramaturg who specialises in developing visual performance and theatre for young people, including through her own company TouchedTheatre. She is passionate about developing quality writing on and for new performance. Beccy has worked for Total Theatre Magazine as a writer, critic and editor for the past five years. She is always keen to hear from new writers interested in developing their writing on contemporary theatre forms.

Fire Exit / David Leddy: Horizontal Collaboration & City of the Blind

There are certain institutions whose very existence feels reassuring. Often NGOs, they are the embodiment of certain principles and their ambitions toward fostering peace, international collaboration or environmental protection give the comforting impression that ‘something is being done’ if even if you yourself are too busy to get directly involved. The UN, and particularly news announcements of the deployment of UN peacekeeping forces (an oxymoron I have never noticed before) has always been, for me, one such institution. But, in these two linked productions, David Leddy shatters these illusions, weaving together extensive research with his richly imaginative approach to new writing to expose the UN’s role in corruption and power grabs through sexual exploitation in conflicts, recent and historic, around the world. The result is both shocking and compelling.

In Horizontal Collaboration, the setting is fictional, though plausible: an unnamed African country, plagued by inter-tribal warfare, primitive perspectives, and a bloodthirsty history. Though the references feel convincingly of the now the action, centred around the family of a dictator’s wife and their grapples to attain and retain power through marriage and assassination, has the ruthless outline and epic resonance of Greek tragedy. ‘It’s biblical,’ several characters repeat, yet into this old testament world of power-plays and revenge enters the UN, not as an intermediary moving things forward, but absolutely as another player in the fight.

Leddy articulates a profoundly effective form through which to articulate this story. In the bowels of a UN building, a secret tribunal is being conducted: an assassination has occurred, war crimes committed, the murky contexts must be investigated. Its testimonies bring us the voices of the educated wife of the warlord Judith K, her mother Mary X, her servant and half sister Grace M and the UN doctor interviewing them, read on each performance by new actors who uncover and invest in the story at the same pace that we do. This allows for some lovely reversals and discoveries and also a rather acute sense of powerlessness (ours and theirs) – the narrative rolls forward like history, its destination unknown. The rigid structures of UN administration, here embodied by a precisely ordered and symmetrical mise en scene where, through matching laptops and neatly rolled scarlet cables, horrific experiences can be filed as coldly numbered testimonies and every shocking reference to UN crime and corruption bracketed by caveats about the bias and unreliability of its speaker. It perfectly encapsulates the limitations of large institutions and their ability to cover up corruption and mistakes. We are witnesses to the UN (re)writing history and the production is at is strongest when it resists dressing or poetically reorganising its material for dramatic effect, allowing story, characters and their clever frame to play out according to their own relentless rules.

Judith K is a disarming protagonist. Intelligent and cool, her inscrutability does allow her to take her place as a centre of power within the play. But the show as a whole goes much further in deconstructing various systems of power. Our awareness of casting choices heightens the gender and racial power structures at play on and off stage. Both productions are concerned with rape and sex as power play, racial and sexual prejudice. Here the spareness, elegant structure, and thoughtful form intensify our encounter with these ideas. Conducted entirely thorugh the staid stage picture of four bureaucrats sitting behind a long table and lit only by practicals – anglepoise lamps and computer screens – whose light, as the story progresses, gradually diminishes (Fire Exit are fantastic at structuring ideas through production dramaturgy), this is rich and provocative play whose testimonies linger as glimpses of possible and disturbing truths in a world that seems a lot darker than when I first walked into the theatre.

In counterpoint to this, City of the Blind is a full and detailed journey expanding on many of the play’s ideas: a Russian novel to the play’s poetry. It has a similarly original approach to form: a set of six episodes streamed to your own device and comprising linked fields of video, audio and photographs. Now we are in the belly of the beast and all of this ‘paperwork’ reflects the experiences of a forensic analyst investigating the trial of crimes concealed by and within the UN. There is a conscious incorporation of the real – each episode is backed up with a host of articles and essays that demonstrate the corruption discussed in the story is a live issue and passing references are made to recognisable international figures such as Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

The story clashes this hyper-reality with mythology – our protagonist Cassandra suffers from a conversion blindness – stress can affect her eyesight profoundly, and these mythological connections are increasingly hammered home in threatening story books she starts receiving to warn her off her investigation. This theme is perhaps an attempt to theatricalise and stylise a form which, though compelling, can’t quite stand up to comparisons with big budget films and TV shows that explore some of the same conspiracy thriller memes. It’s intriguing to encounter the story through your phone and laptop, but in a world when much big budget media can also be consumed this way it doesn’t quite make itself different enough to avert direct comparison.

What both productions self consciously share is a desire to muddy the water between a person’s morality and their actions: ‘Why do good people do bad things?’ Judith asks and is asked, repeatedly – the question itself starts to feel naive. The amorality of desire is a theme woven throughout City of the Blind and the more expansive and flexible form here allows us to delve into characters’ private sexual worlds as well as their actions on public record. The hypocrisy of drawing a line in the sand about where judgement should be made becomes more apparent. The other recurring statement that spans both shows is ‘I have absolutely no idea what happens next’ – deliciously metatheatrical in Horizontal Collaboration and an admission of powerlessness or suspense in City of the Blind. What is encapsulated is the heightened sense that our own actions have the possibility of initiating change (an idea, of course, intrinsically linked to performance). For me the underlying impact of this double bill is, in fact, a call for action, as well as a call to re-think.

A Taste of the Future

Beccy Smith reflects on Stoke’s Appetite programme and the challenge of valuing the arts

July 2014 has been a month about money. The first day of the month saw the announcement by Arts Council England of their national portfolio organisations for 2015 – 2018, unleashing a flurry of discussion on social media and national newspaper comment threads chewing over the new acquisitions; the politics behind salami-slicing for those that remained regularly funded; and the many previous beneficiaries and new applicants who missed out (some of whom have been courageous enough to stick their heads over the parapet and advance conversations about the possible underlying strategies in play. Thus, a cap must be tipped to Camden People’s Theatre, long time champion of experimental small-scale work, and for the first time to become part of the Portfolio; with commiserations to former Total Theatre Award-winners 1927, who have wowed the world with their extraordinary mix of animation and live performance, but who failed to gain portfolio status.

Of course any announcement of major public funding for the arts also triggers debate about the justification for subsidy in general. Few critical voices have been raised about the decision to cut nearly £5 million a year from the English National Opera’s three-year grant. Why not? Because it is seen as being a company who make work in an artform regarded by many as elitist and exclusive. We are all operating in a political context where the justification for investment of taxpayers money is under ongoing attack, meaning inclusivity and engagement even more critical than usual for making the case for the arts. The inclusion (in spite of the additionally principle) of Lottery monies to prop up DCMS’s reduced settlement to arts organisations intensifies this priority as lottery money draws more substantively from lower income communities. At the same time, this year’s public investment strategy happens against a backdrop of campaigns from the industry to address fairer payment of artists for their work: the ‘I’ll Show you Mine’ discussion triggered by Bryony Kimmings’ blog.

The contrast between these two positions – where culture is seen as self-indulgently drawing investment away from more important priorities at the same time as market rates persistently undervaluing the work and time of those creating art – illustrates a growing tension at the heart of arts policy and public discourse about culture. Critical to this debate is the question of how and why we value the arts as a society and if it is possible, in this so-called age of austerity, to foster a stronger sense of just what culture is worth.

No Fit State Circus – Bianco

And it’s to these thorny questions that the targeted projects supported by Arts Council England’s Creative People and Places (CPP) fund address themselves. Focused on communities with historically low attendance and engagement in the arts, these projects, which launched for the first time in 2013, are action research partnerships that aim to experiment with new approaches to develop inspiring and sustainable relationship between local communities and arts organisations; to foster a sense of the value of cultural experiences which, over the mid term (projects are encouraged to create 10-year visions for communities going forward) will transform the cultural habits of a community.

What the Creative People and Places projects are addressing is no less a question than this: How can you create value for the arts amongst constituencies for whom much culture feels irrelevant? Few artists themselves, of course, are interested in making work for the select minority but nevertheless the question of how to reach out to new audiences, so often practically brokered not by the artist, or even the work, but by the venue or producing partner by which the work is framed, has long been a frustrating one. In Stoke, the winning project proposal, spearheaded appropriately enough, by a venue (the New Vic), is Appetite.

Working from the metaphor in its title, the approach, unique amongst other CPP research structures, has been to spend the first year of their three-year programme ‘skilling up’ audiences through opportunities to sample a range of unexpected arts experiences. I learned recently that it is only after tasting something eight times that your body becomes used to the flavour – one of the reasons children can be so fussy about new foods. The approach of Appetite, led by project director Karl Greenwood with local producer Gemma Thomas, is to cultivate audiences by developing a sense of their own taste within communities. Free programmes of world-class art brought to Stoke, offered in unusual locations and formats, offer audiences a chance to try something new not once, but several times, to decide what they like. At the same time, Appetite works with existing and new community groups to support the development of community programmers seeing an even greater range of work, including facilitated trips to Greenwich and Docklands International Festival and Lumiere in Newcastle. The dialogue is focused between community representatives, who know their area and are themselves talking to residents about emerging themes of interest stimulated by Appetite’s free programme, and potential visiting artists and productions.

Periplum The Bell – Stoke Appetite 2 & 3 Aug 2014

Much of the work presented in Stoke during the first year’s free programmes is happening on the street, in the neighbourhood, or in pop-up bespoke venues such as NoFitState’s big top tent for their show Bianco. This approach to programming favours artists making work in experimental forms, outside of regular theatre and art spaces – street theatre, circus, interactive work, outdoor arts, and audio walks. Several key ‘total theatre’ companies – Periplum, Upswing, Inspector Sands – have been, or will be, showcased through the programme. There’s an intuitive understanding, refreshing to see in a venue-led consortium, that the wonder and surprise arguably essential in altering what may be entrenched opinions about cultural events are at their most accessible in the immediate encounters offered by alternative forms presented outside of the theatre venues. We could here flag up the model of the Stockton International Riverside Festival, which for many decades has taken outdoor arts and site-responsive theatre to one of the less privileged areas of Britain, over the years (under the direction of Frank Wilson) developing an educated audience who happily welcome top-quality performance work from across the globe.

On the day I visited Stoke, a schools performance of Australian choreographer Shaun Parker’s Spill (featured image, above) was on offer at a playground in a housing estate in the north of the city. It was a simple site, a stretch of rubbery tarmac with a cuboid climbing frame, a slide and a rotating swing on a tall angled stand on the edge of an estate set into the side of a hill, that was adorned with red and white England flags hanging from windows and car aerials. Around the playground a couple of Appetite pennants fluttered in the low breeze, branding the event, and on a couple of mats in front, a gaggle of patient schoolchildren wriggled in the sun. Parker’s performance, produced by DanceXchange, was first commissioned for the Cultural Olympiad and sets out to transform the familiar community spaces of local playgrounds by animating them with bespoke choreography. Now, having spent just a couple of days before on site, the company saunter and skate into the frame to an urban grime soundtrack, and proceed to play the site, using choreography that combines muscular acrobalance, breakdancing, playful competition, and some clever use of the different shapes and momentums offered by this playground’s kit. The tone is childlike and warm, the watching children shift from uncertainty to very obviously being impressed. It’s a clever way to offer creative performance as an intervention in the familiar, and the show is followed by a workshop for children and adults who want to try out some of the moves (I love the idea of that particular playground never again being used in quite the way it was intended as a legacy of this programme!).

As the World Tipped by Wired Aerial Theatre Images provided courtesy of Andrew Billington Photography 8

Wired Aerial Theatre, As the World Tipped | Andrew Billington Photography

A by-product of programming work such as Spill that exists outside of venues is in its different engagement with place. The arrival of a posse of street artists at the bus interchange or of the enormous suspended stage of As the World Tipped (Wired Aerial’s large-scale outdoor arts piece) in a local park is itself a surpass and provocation, visibly transforming a familiar place. Going one step further along the site-responsive route, writer and artist Dan Thompson has been commissioned as artist-in-residence for a whole year for the whole street of London Road, a process focussed on unearthing stories from every (fascinating) building along the road. Here we can see the impact of this sort of programme as not only asserting the value of cultural activity, but also reclaiming the value of the places they are sited in. Stoke’s industrial and craft base, specialising in pottery and dominating all employment in the city, has been hit hard by recent recessions. Thompson’s work (supported by Stoke West and Oakhill Community Association) as artist-in-residence here, focuses on rediscovering the beauty and interest of derelict sites, forgotten architecture, and histories hidden by supermarkets, reawakening a sense of the value obscured by depression and decay.

Appetite’s ongoing and evolving programme of activity models some significant alternative ways of offering and encountering culture. In thinking specifically about place – including by programming work of particular interest to communities such as, in Stoke, hosting the British Ceramics Biennial – the project’s research acknowledges that the needs and wishes of different audiences are different, and that supporting the grassroots is just as vitally important as the national organisations supporting work of strategic significance. By trying to work with communities in developing understanding about the offers the arts might make to them, the debate about value is taken out of the hands of specialists and straight to audiences.

Appetitelaunchevent_Image-by-Andrew-Billington

Appetite launch event | Andrew Billington Photography

Of course the nature of value is slippery – it’s a peculiarly intangible thing to attempt to measure. Money itself is hopelessly abstracted from many of our everyday needs. A sense of value is palpable in those moments, familiar to actors, between audience and stage when the audience are rapt. It’s visible today in the instances on their mat when the schoolchildren watching Spill all look at one another in disbelieving glee about one of the company’s acrobatic feats. In more complicated ways, it is present in the number of people who materialise to see a production, or in the energy with which they applaud at the end – but it’s extraordinarily hard to actually quantify. Appetite are now in the tricky transitioning stage of exploring what their communities would be wiling to pay to feed the appetite they’ve been fostering, and no one can second-guess how this will play out. These projects are framed as research for a reason.

Debates about how the arts and artists reach out to audiences, making their offer to lift people out of everyday life, or cast new light upon it, should be compelling not only politically but in an essential way, about the art. To take only the former view we render the arts as instrument, as only a tool to regenerate and effect socio-economic change. However effective such programming may be (and the evidence is mixed, at best), if this becomes the final arbiter then no sustainable future is possible. Culture can never be the first tool to lift people out of poverty and pain, however powerful it is. But in Stoke it is possible to see the ways that art can alter perspectives. There’s an argument being built here about the significance to culture of alternative forms and grassroots movements sadly only partially reflected in the recent funding decisions made by ACE for its national portfolio 2015–2018. The case emerging here is of the ways the arts, thoughtfully offered, can do what they’re best at – transforming place, enriching experience, entertaining, and provoking. And hopefully, that’ll be enough to send people back for seconds.

The Appetite Taster programme runs throughout summer 2014 at various locations in Stoke.

For further information and dates of all shows and events, see www.appetitestoke.co.uk/

The Appetite programme is funded by Arts Council England and is led by the New Vic Theatre in partnership with B Arts, Brighter Futures, Partners in Creative Learning and Staffordshire University.

I Am A Camera

Hotel Modern: The Great War

Cinematography is a precise and demanding business. Juggling angling, light and shadow, the right lens, the challenge of a smooth pan or unforgiving close up. As a theatre maker, such preoccupations feel fussy: I’m interested in the freedom of the live moment, immediacy and mess! So it has been provocative and mind-expanding as both artist and audience to encounter over two nights two whole shows devoted to the language of live feed, and experienced largely through the perspective of ingeniously moving on stage camera eyes, or ‘I’s.

In LIFT’s The Great War (24–26 June, at the Southbank Centre), Dutch company Hotel Modern, who specialise in work of this form, have conjured the maps, the mud, and senseless destruction of the trenches in miniature. Their handheld cameras are passed from person to person racing around the various tiny stages to capture the changing environments of the war, from parkland to wasteland providing what feel like the first hand perspectives of bespoke miniscule figures that stare and wait, aim and fire, fall and disintegrate into shallow graves. The company demonstrate a delight in the material – hands plunge into soil, moulding and banking trenches and pools, there are a host of witty plays on scale with carrot tops standing in for trees, a bicarbonate of soda snowfall that in one compelling sequence leaves bodies fizzing into decomposition. This revelling in the objects has it apotheosis in the on-stage work of sound designer Arthur Sauer who performs alongside the film’s action creating a sensational foley soundtrack with a mixture of identifiable instruments, assorted objects, his body, and voice. The energy and invention as he dives between petal percussion to reach the mic in time to deploy a train’s whistle, or conjures a mustard gas drop by lighting a match, or recreates sucking mud by rubbing and slapping his skin, are completely compelling.

The great strength of this show is in the visceral, first person styled perspective conjured by the camera’s gaze upon passing marching feet or the view up the end of a periscope. These visions are accompanied by occasionally stilted readings of letters home from war experiences by what seem to be a number of different soldiers. A little more context to those accounts might’ve made their descriptions more compelling – although they’re apparently true life accounts, at times they felt simply like a litany of stock World War I experience and this can alienate. The show also suffers from being over-illustrative: the inventively conjured images often appear exactly as they are described to microphone which has the affect of setting up a rather steady rhythm. The visual surprises, when they come, happen in moments freed from voice over, when the company give themselves free rein to simply play with soil and water, dry ice and carrot tops.

Charleroi Danses: Kiss & Cry

Dance-film production Kiss & Cry (at the Barbican, 25–28 June) takes a more oblique approach in both the story it tells and the form in which it is told. The ambition of Belgian company Charleroi Danses to create a dance performance using only their hands already places the focus of the piece squarely off centre. Writer Thomas Gunzig’s narrated story of one woman’s five loves is similarly odd, littered with wise-sounding aphorisms that twist into glorious non sequiturs (‘Some loves are like an onion. Dry on the outside, then they make you cry. In the end they are hard to digest’), setting up a surreal, self deprecating tone. These lost loves however provide a sturdy structure for the first three quarters of the story against which the visual play of the film and bodies can run riot. The theme of memory is superlatively filmic: its odd effects in turn playing incidents writ large across the mind’s eye, and at others sweeping them away into unexpected pits of forgetting. The company creates concrete worlds that realise memory’s palpable, ineffable mechanisms: hundreds of people and incidents shunted into drawers and boxes; the ways a specific memory of one time and place can seamlessly cross fade into a seemingly unrelated image or sensation.

If a love of materials animates for Hotel Modern, here it is movement that fuels the production. Though the camera’s focus is squarely from the wrist down the company at times invite us to consider the choreography around it – the beautiful and tender contortions that frame the strange images on screen. Appropriately enough, this is a piece in almost constant movement, from codified courtly hand dances, to rushing sweeps down unexpected black holes. To fuel this language the company have created elaborate technical apparatus including a dolly which stretches across much of the stage, a high-definition camera attached to a toy train, a special rotatable set with in-built camera that does very odd things to your sense of perspective and gravity. The effect is of a kaleidoscopic journey down the rabbit hole of the mind, wildly creative yet littered with identifiable moments figured in the most unexpected forms. Our protagonist Josephine is sometimes a hunched figure, handbag in lap, waiting patiently, and remembering on a bench, but more often an astonishingly expressive female hand (this and all parts taken by multiple members of the on-stage ensemble whilst others rush from post to post setting up the next camera, cuing sound) and the production is a masterpiece of the expressive power of good choreography. There are laughs of recognition from the audience in every relationship scene – we see ourselves in the rhythm of advance or rejection, the twirls of wild hopefulness in this most abstract of languages.

Charleroi Danses are a company who specialise in dance on film and the sheer quality of their technical nous supports them to make some wildly ambitious and beautiful images here using light, colour, live projection, and shifts in perspective so slick as to occasionally feel alienating: it’s hard to remember that these images are being made before your eyes. Play with mirrors and superimposition illustrate the strange creativity in this most human of tools. Their expertise, coupled with the energetic inventiveness of the form make this an astonishingly moving and evocative performance that celebrates human dexterousness and fragility through the medium of a single hand.

And it is the energy and effort of these two companies, dashing from set up to set up across the stage, literally throwing themselves into strange contortions and odd materials to conjure images, making themselves do it live, that transforms this work from the cinematic to its more humane and (for my money) powerful sister, the theatrical.

Tim Crouch: Adler & Gibb

Adler & Gibb tells a story about art, love and appropriation. On the way it touches on the nature of acting, the unvoiced demands of the audience, the murky territory where art meets life. This exploration occurs largely through words, in dialogue between characters and occasionally with us the audience. It is a play, it’s on the main stage at the Royal Court and boasts an impressive cast list, yet it warrants critical coverage here in Total Theatre because it is also determinedly experimental. ‘I don’t want to have to work this hard’, complains one man behind me during the interval, ‘I come here to be entertained!’ Language may be the primary medium of Adler & Gibb, but it’s through form that the fundamental meaning is expressed.

Through the detailed story of the life and legacy of a conceptual artist Janet Adler, here framed as an increasingly desperate student thesis presentation, Crouch with his co-directors and long-time collaborators Karl James and Andy Smith, is really interested in excavating questions around our relationship with artists and their work. This academic bookend, although a recognisable devised theatre trope that adds a density of expression that can feel alienating, is sound dramaturgy – the first instance of the wresting of Adler’s art into frames of reference irrelevant to the actual work. Even the conceptual art world Adler had courted finds itself unable to digest her increasingly bold provocations of life as art (offering a real puppy as a response to one commission).The meat of the story concerns an unauthorised biopic being made about her life, counterpointed by the lead actress’s search for realism through abrasive Stanislavkian exercises set by her svengali-like coach. He commands her to search for truth and work with what is real: this is the height of dramatic successfulness, is it not? The audience of course is fully inscripted within this provocation. We are invited to consider our own rapacious interest in the real lives behind celebrity images (if this had been a play about a real celebrity, would it have made a bigger media splash?) and perhaps too our expectations about naturalism as the most emotionally satisfying form of representation on stage, feeding us the inner lives of its characters.

The formal experimentation focuses in the first half on the nature of what is ‘real’ on stage. Actress Louisa and her coach Sam present their scenes in studied two-dimensionality: their voices are full of inflection but their bodies rigid, front facing and still. The disconnect this creates foregrounds the artificiality of their endeavour on the biopic and also chips away at the mechanisms of this show here and now. In contrast we are presented with two children, who play and hang out on stage in the background, stepping forward to play the part of animals that figure in the story and work as stage managers, handing props and creating atmosphere with smoke machines. So far, so Brechtian. We buy this intellectual conceit because it places us not the ‘right’ side: we’re with Adler, we understand that all representation is misrepresentation: we don’t want to see her work appropriated against her clearly articulated wishes. The first half sets these ideas into play with studied rigour, intercut with the serious academic postures that the student (a younger version of Louisa, it becomes clear) strikes, but as a result its theatrical languages, for all the fucking and bleeding in the action, feel a little dry.

The second half shifts gear though – suddenly we’re in the world, in Adler’s house, in her grave even. The characters are performing in themselves and in the space and the separate reality of the children and animals has gone. The story of an obsession takes centre stage. Following the advice of his own on-stage coach, Crouch keeps on raising the stakes to almost preposterous levels but the play manages to just about keep its wheels on because of the emotional centre emanating from the bereaved lover, Gibb. The notion of the reality of love as life changing, of a life as art offered to just one audience Other, is resonant. But as we are drawn into the emotional heart of the story, where does this leave the intellectual frame? Perhaps the intention is for us to recognise that the show, in giving us what we want, what appeals to us as an audience, make us complicit in the fate of Adler’s work and her story?

Yet, as Brecht discovered, story’s seductive power has the ability to draw us in despite theatrical attempts to confound it. For all the clear and pleasing formal frames of the closing scenes (through cameras, screens, acting theories and film production), what lingers are the emotional realities portrayed: the sense of neediness that drives the desperate reach to frame your identity through art, and also the transformative, irreducible power of profound connection and love. I’m not sure this takeaway isn’t at odds with the underlying ambitions of the play. All its underlying arguments propose how true interiority – love, death, instinct – can never be available to us (and that we shouldn’t want them to be), yet its moments of humanity are deeply compelling. There’s more life in this art than meets the eye.

Belarus Free Theatre: Red Forest

It was at LIFT 2012 with the show Minsk 2011: A Reply to Kathy Acker that the Belarus Free Theatre burst on to the consciousness of Britain’s theatre scene. Fugitive from their own oppressive state, the company’s voice accesses a passion and sincerity rarely available in work made here. In this co-production with the Young Vic , the company’s creative team is joined by performers and artists from other countries, uniting in the ambition to create work that speaks vividly for those who do not have a voice, raising awareness of the plight of people under the regime in Belarus and elsewhere.

For the creation of Red Forest the company have cast their net wide, collecting testimonies from individuals in many states. What unifies the stories isn’t always clear beyond the broadest of banners: all of these voices tell of experiences of suffering for reasons beyond their control, be that civil war, natural disaster, resource exploitation. Not all can be attributed to man’s inhumanity to man and the show’s core question as framed by Young Vic Director David Lan in the programme – ‘What are you using your freedom for?’ – doesn’t necessarily feel like it’s articulated in the piece as a whole. Rather, this feels like a paean to a lost way of being, a lament on the destructive disconnect between mankind and the world from which we’re formed.

The show opens with a Native American ceremony, as the sun rises over the stage in video. The voice of the man represented here is soundtracked, rendering his actions almost filmic, crisp and strange. The stage space – a triptych of earth surrounded by two panels of water – is carved out as ceremonial space. On either side, two banks of indigenous instruments behind a corrugated plastic sheet are manned. Earth, water, light, music – this is an elemental vision of humanity.

The show’s action is presented through the eyes of a young woman who finds it too hard to approach her own Nigerian mother’s history and so displaces her focus to witnessing other stories. Performer Michal Keyamo, playing a new mother, perhaps her own, but increasingly archetypal in her huddled protection of a tiny babe in arms, then becomes the focal point of a series of accounts that span nations in their tale of human suffering in the first decade of the twentieth century (each story is prefaced by a projection detailing the time and place of the account. I wanted more, but perhaps that’s another show). Each voice triggers a new scene, a new place, and the young woman and baby are washed along with the life of the world conjured physically.

This is a deeply lyrical production and it takes time for its energy to settle and the language to assert itself. All of the testimonies are voiced over, and the mimed early sequences on stage feel a little overdrawn and naive. As the action become less illustrative, working in counterpoint with the voices, the richness of the show reveals itself. The ensemble work is lovely, making easy muscular sketches of different communities from around the world, gently, expertly bring these places to life through evocative gesture and play, in both celebration and violence, often animated by full throated song. Video and lighting designer Andrew Croft excels in creating a thing of profound beauty that plays stunningly with the effects of colour, water, lyrical photographic and digital imagery, light and shadow. The piece becomes more mesmeric as it builds and despite the relentless bleakness of the stories portrayed the beauty with which they are expressed itself conveys a sort of hopefulness. If we can make this stuff beautiful, what else are we capable of?