January 24, 2007
It seems that JG Ballard’s 1989 story ‘The Enormous Space’ has touched a nerve with the contemporary drama world. In 2005, Antony Sher made a brief but acclaimed return to television drama in ‘Home’, a BBC adaptation of the story, shown on BBC4, and sparked another surge of interest in Ballard’s peculiar oeuvre. Now a new adaptation is being performed within the intimate confines of the Burton Taylor, an environment paradoxically well suited to the subject matter. The story is concerned with the mental breakdown of Gerry Ballantyne, the middle-class suburbanite whose wife has left him and who decides to become a profound recluse, proposing that as an “experiment”, he will reduce his environment to nothing more than his suburban house, the boundary being the front door which serves both as a limit to his own movements and a weapon “to shun out the world”. Vowing to live solely from the produce which the house can provide (in a chillingly extreme reworking of ‘The Good Life’), Gerry rapidly descends into primitivism, consuming anything edible that remains in the house and sucking at cardboard packaging for nutrition, before slaughtering a neighbour’s unfortunate cat for sustenance. The experiment, in effect, is a form of passive suicide, the sickening transgression in obtaining food an instinctual resistance to that suicide. The repulsion/absorption ambiguity of human interaction is, in this instance, kept conservatively in check: in Ballard’s original, Gerry is driven, implicitly, to cannibalism. This production draws the line at murder.
The task of adapting the story is considerable; for the television version, a video diary was used to great effect to convey the stages of mental degeneration, while visual effects were able to recreate the hallucinatory effects of starvation and isolation, particularly the perceived expansion of the house to fill the void created by Gerry’s agoraphobic isolation. In the play, the space is determinedly rigid. The cardboard-box environment in which the audience watches Gerry’s breakdown is entirely objective; we see it taking place but, because of the predominantly mimed performance, the subjective experience is lost on us. We are largely bemused; we pity but we fail to empathise.
As a play, ‘The Enormous Space’ does work on some levels, and stands as an interesting and entertaining curio, well performed by a capable cast (although their youth works against them – the story is about the disintegration of an established marriage), but much of Ballard’s original insight into mental decay is overlooked. The mechanics of the experiment are glossed over rather too quickly to really give a sense of meaning to the enormous space of the title, while the deliberately prosaic blandness of Ballard’s suburban setting is made self-consciously theatrical and artificial, which largely defeats the object. On the other hand, the production will most likely appeal to those already familiar with the story, in which case the opportunity to view an externalisation of what is essentially an interior monologue may well prove entertaining.
The task of adapting the story is considerable; for the television version, a video diary was used to great effect to convey the stages of mental degeneration, while visual effects were able to recreate the hallucinatory effects of starvation and isolation, particularly the perceived expansion of the house to fill the void created by Gerry’s agoraphobic isolation. In the play, the space is determinedly rigid. The cardboard-box environment in which the audience watches Gerry’s breakdown is entirely objective; we see it taking place but, because of the predominantly mimed performance, the subjective experience is lost on us. We are largely bemused; we pity but we fail to empathise.
As a play, ‘The Enormous Space’ does work on some levels, and stands as an interesting and entertaining curio, well performed by a capable cast (although their youth works against them – the story is about the disintegration of an established marriage), but much of Ballard’s original insight into mental decay is overlooked. The mechanics of the experiment are glossed over rather too quickly to really give a sense of meaning to the enormous space of the title, while the deliberately prosaic blandness of Ballard’s suburban setting is made self-consciously theatrical and artificial, which largely defeats the object. On the other hand, the production will most likely appeal to those already familiar with the story, in which case the opportunity to view an externalisation of what is essentially an interior monologue may well prove entertaining.