July 13, 2008
‘That was very challenging’, said the chap sat behind me at the end of Twilight of the Gods, the third of the plays in Mark Ravenhill’s trio staged as part of the inaugural North Wall drama festival. Thinking of possible synonyms for such a judgement of a new play, one gets near to an idea of how we must come to look at Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat: ‘With-it’, ‘relevant’, and ‘important’, all spring to mind as suitable alternatives, but one struggles to lose oneself in the plays as pieces of fiction because of the pressure of watching something that more than one critic quoted on the programme has called ‘significant’.
Beside these, fourteen other plays on the theme of contemporary war and warfare were written for the Ravenhill for Breakfast strand staged by Paines Plough at the Edinburgh festival fringe in 2007, and later performed under their current title this past April in venues across London. Taking these plays consecutively over the course of a single hour rather than one per day, the breakfast theme becomes a little oppressive, especially when the dialogue and action of each of the plays convinces one that Ravenhill sees the digestive system as potently symbolic of the wider human condition. Each of the leading women of these plays has her own, telling relationship to the alimentary canal: one is plagued by a mysterious agonizing pain, another obsesses about breakfast and fresh pasta when her interlocutor wants to talk about sex, the third has been starved by food shortage created by an invading army’s struggle with insurgents.
Raquel Cassidy, familiar from many television roles, gives the evening’s most convincing performance as Helen, whose otherwise perfect life is plagued by a unpredictable gut-ache, self-diagnosed as a caffeine intolerance. Her monologue centres around detailing her idealized breakfast routine, but is overshadowed by a fear of war and bombs that seemingly has no concrete foundation or close, needful, relevance to her neat life, thrown into disorder only by her stomach pain.
One is struck by the synopses of both Helen’s story in Intolerance and that which follows in Love (But I Won’t Do That), as concerning women who are middle-class. Do we as theatregoers need to be told that we are watching our own on stage? Are we, for Ravenhill, so unable to escape from World of Interiors and UKTV Food that we are tarred by the same brush as these brutally flawed characters? I was disturbed slightly by the sexual politics of this second piece as, essentially, its woman was nothing but a stomach and a set of reservations, its man, an occupying soldier, nothing but a penis and a need to be in charge.
Each of the three pieces has a very different physicality, and it is for this that Paines Plough’s artistic director Roxanna Silbert cannot be praised too highly. Helen mostly sits, the soldier and his landlady, Marion, dance around one another, one moment touching, another raging at one another. In Twilight of the Gods, an academic called Susan (played by Cassidy with a southern African accent that could easily be read as Zimbabwean) is interrogated by a woman representing an occupying force, and they face each other over a table completing what is effectively a customer care questionnaire. The movements which the interrogator forbids Susan to make are wonderfully sly and sudden, and the moving final moments were possibly those most likely to be presenting the ‘challenge’ my fellow-watcher felt the need to acknowledge.
Beside these, fourteen other plays on the theme of contemporary war and warfare were written for the Ravenhill for Breakfast strand staged by Paines Plough at the Edinburgh festival fringe in 2007, and later performed under their current title this past April in venues across London. Taking these plays consecutively over the course of a single hour rather than one per day, the breakfast theme becomes a little oppressive, especially when the dialogue and action of each of the plays convinces one that Ravenhill sees the digestive system as potently symbolic of the wider human condition. Each of the leading women of these plays has her own, telling relationship to the alimentary canal: one is plagued by a mysterious agonizing pain, another obsesses about breakfast and fresh pasta when her interlocutor wants to talk about sex, the third has been starved by food shortage created by an invading army’s struggle with insurgents.
Raquel Cassidy, familiar from many television roles, gives the evening’s most convincing performance as Helen, whose otherwise perfect life is plagued by a unpredictable gut-ache, self-diagnosed as a caffeine intolerance. Her monologue centres around detailing her idealized breakfast routine, but is overshadowed by a fear of war and bombs that seemingly has no concrete foundation or close, needful, relevance to her neat life, thrown into disorder only by her stomach pain.
One is struck by the synopses of both Helen’s story in Intolerance and that which follows in Love (But I Won’t Do That), as concerning women who are middle-class. Do we as theatregoers need to be told that we are watching our own on stage? Are we, for Ravenhill, so unable to escape from World of Interiors and UKTV Food that we are tarred by the same brush as these brutally flawed characters? I was disturbed slightly by the sexual politics of this second piece as, essentially, its woman was nothing but a stomach and a set of reservations, its man, an occupying soldier, nothing but a penis and a need to be in charge.
Each of the three pieces has a very different physicality, and it is for this that Paines Plough’s artistic director Roxanna Silbert cannot be praised too highly. Helen mostly sits, the soldier and his landlady, Marion, dance around one another, one moment touching, another raging at one another. In Twilight of the Gods, an academic called Susan (played by Cassidy with a southern African accent that could easily be read as Zimbabwean) is interrogated by a woman representing an occupying force, and they face each other over a table completing what is effectively a customer care questionnaire. The movements which the interrogator forbids Susan to make are wonderfully sly and sudden, and the moving final moments were possibly those most likely to be presenting the ‘challenge’ my fellow-watcher felt the need to acknowledge.