Reviews

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

August 29th, 2015 by Michael Begg

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 […]

Ontroerend Goed: A Game of You

August 29th, 2015 by Terry O'Donovan

To be honest I don’t quite know how to write about A Game of You without giving said game away. And that would utterly spoil the experience for you… but I can share a flavour of this craftily brilliant piece of work. The experience is the third in the company’s acclaimed series of works that […]

Tim Spooner: The Assembly of Animals

August 29th, 2015 by Dorothy Max Prior

It’s like a 3D dogugaeshi as the red curtains slide back, revealing more and more in the depth of the space. But in place of painted Japanese screens, we get a ’performed sculpture’; an assemblage of animated objects and automata whizzing and whirring on little tables. It starts with a sheep – a funny little […]

Light, Ladd and Emberton: Caitlin

August 28th, 2015 by Lisa Wolfe

They give us the money shot early. Caitlin curled around Dylan’s head like a Welsh blanket. Is she suffocating him or shielding him from something? From himself perhaps, or more likely, from her. For while Dylan Thomas was a notorious boozer and womaniser, it is Caitlin’s wilder and less predictable spirit that we are here […]

Caroline Horton & Co: Islands