Caroline Horton - Islands

Caroline Horton & Co: Islands

Caroline Horton - IslandsOh Mary, oh Eve, what alarming, degrading, furious role models you are for womankind. Ruling your shitty, filthy world, with your lack of morals and shifting affiliations, with your disorganised bodies, shallow greed and steel hearts. Who should I follow and what should I believe?

Caroline Horton’s ensemble show, which premiered in January, set the critical elite howling and some of the Bush audience spluttering out part-way through. It has since gathered deeper, more informed comment online. Coming to it now, with so much back-story, I was still unprepared for the force of the thing which from the moment of entry is a dystopian feast for the senses.

Mary (Caroline Horton) is a greedy, ambitious god who with her acolytes (John Biddle and Seirol Davies, trans-gender clad) wants to shit on Shitworld from her floating island, called Haven. The story is painted with a broad brush on a mucky canvas.  Nothing is subtle here, there is no subtext or interrogation of economics (despite the involvement of specialist advisors). What you see, hear, and smell is a playful, overblown, monstrous journey that takes in social climbing, stock market crashes, capitalism, and tax evasion.

The writing is over-explanatory at times, but there are some knock-out sequences featuring radio hosts and some great lines. I enjoyed a reference to ‘Ayn Rand on glockenspiel,’ the idea of God ‘watching porn and listening to the Archers’ and the notion that in Shitworld everything is made better by a cup of tea. As it rolled along, with coups and crashes, and play-acting and a sense of its own ridiculousness, Islands brought to mind Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce and Ubu Roi.

The cast goes at it with gusto and Hannah Ringham, as Eve, is the thumping heart of the piece. She offers an intense, emotional response to the alarming events unfolding around her. Eve and Adam (Simon Startin) both get flipped; lose their moral compass. Their degradation is quite sickening.

The visual world is perfectly realised by the design team and Elena Pena’s sound design is full of texture. The songs are less convincing. God feels the need to end on a big number, of course she does, but it didn’t quite hit the spot for me. The action moves around inside a square, neatly choreographed but a somewhat obscured from the second row of seats.

In essence, Islands sets up a crazed, anarchic playground for a very bitter, rather over-long, fairy tale. It lambasts religion and rails against corruption while shitting on the weak. If you go to it with an open mind, prepared to face its verbal and stylistic challenge, you will find the humour in it – as the actors so clearly do. Islands is as much a howl against bland theatre as against society.

Produced by Caroline Horton & Co, China Plate and the Bush Theatre

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About Lisa Wolfe

Lisa Wolfe is a freelance theatre producer and project manager of contemporary small-scale work. Companies and people she has supported include: A&E Comedy, Three Score Dance, Pocket Epics, Jennifer Irons,Tim Crouch, Liz Aggiss, Sue MacLaine, Spymonkey and many more. Lisa was Marketing Manager at Brighton Dome and Festival (1989-2001) and has also worked for South East Dance, Chichester Festival Theatre and Company of Angels. She is Marketing Manager for Carousel, learning-disability arts company.