Green Screen

At the very end of Green Screen (and I don’t think I’m giving much away) some text is projected on a strip of, yes, green screen, like a surtitle.  The last sentence reads something like, ‘…there was a good feeling between us, even though nothing had happened.’  That statement pretty much covers what we’d seen – although, like so much else here, the very fact that ‘nothing had happened’ is exactly the point.  ‘Nothing happened’, it is implied, because human beings are inadequate to the task of saving the world and all we have are the distractions of quotidian life, the occasional exchange of warmth and momentary connections.

The characters - an ‘emo’ young woman, a second woman who speaks Italian throughout (though the others understand her and respond in English), a talkative bloke in a wooly hat and a second bloke with a ‘project’ to introduce bowing as a ritual between strangers – all have by the end done (achieved) nothing, but yet, through chit-chat, bowing to each other and some marching and dance moves – they have connected – albeit tentatively – and engendered ‘a good feeling’.  This is all that they (and we) have.

A ‘green screen’, as we know, is a blank, green background against which actors play their parts, recorded with a camera that does not ‘read’ green, allowing another background – anything from a teeming city to the weather map – to be layered into the image.  There’s a metaphor in that.  The characters here (like us, the piece seems to say) are acting in front of a (metaphorical) green screen and so are connected to a setting or location  - or context? -  added or controlled by someone else.  At least, that’s my interpretation of the title.  There could be others.  That’s what makes this show a kind of mild fun.  You can simply enjoy the absurdities or puzzle it out.

Green Screen, while at first seeming to be a random and rambling series of thoughts and small incidents, in fact abounds in metaphors, allegory, allusions and ideas, some of which are quite clear, some a little clunko, and some quite opaque – at least to me.

The following may give you some idea.  The show begins with three motionless, silent characters in a room, apparently waiting for something.  Their background, a mural on their room wall, is a tropical island beach with white sand, palm trees, etc.  In other words, nothing to do with them – or, as the existentialists might say, ‘absurd’. 

The show’s creator, Nicola Gunn, appears and proceeds to lay out a queue – a queue, not a line – of small plastic animals from upstage to down.  When complete, she writes TOILET in chalk on the door at the head of the queue.  She then joins the queue herself.  Laughter.  (During the entire show, there were continuous bursts of giggles, guffaws and knowing chuckles, as if to say, ‘Oh I get it…’)  The queue of plastic animals is not referred to again.  The three human characters in front of the tropical beach pay no heed. 

Ms Gunn then delivers a monologue on a variety of subjects.  She does this, I must say, with exquisite comic timing and a great deal of charm.  A thread through this confiding address to the audience is the futility of doing much at all, or rather, the avoidance of risk and therefore (Inevitable) failure. 

She proceeds to describe how she and her friends Rachel and Gwen formed a fan club for the (real, award winning) novelist Nicola Barker.  Ms Barker’s latest work is called Darkmans, a work that, Ms Gunn implies, rather bores her, as a matter of fact.  Around the middle of this spiel, she inflates rubber mattresses and an inflatable pool toy and builds a sort of platform.  (At the end, this platform is deflated by the always-visible Stage Manager – a phlegmatic Meg Richardson - making it increasingly unstable until Ms Gunn falls off it.  Another metaphor.)

Ms Gunn changes into a gold lametop, leopard skin print pants, a feathered headdress and smears herself with gold.  I don’t know what this means.  Judging from the knowing laughter around me, some audience members did know what it means.  I didn’t.  From the top of the mattress platform, before adopting a kneeling, sphinxlike pose (which looks increasingly uncomfortable and therefore distracts), Ms Gunn then throws the focus to the characters in that room across the stage, who so far have sat schtumm.  She asks us to imagine a situation invented by the aforesaid Nicola Barker in which some people gather to protest the end of humanity.  What these characters turn out to do, at least as a protest, is absolutely nothing.  Neither Humanity nor protest is mentioned. 

Make of all this what you will, but you can, indeed, make something out of it, because it is not all that obscure.  Whether it is worth seventy minutes to say the very little the performance has to say is another matter.  I believe the something is this: the problems facing humanity are so overwhelming that humans can only distract themselves by connecting (briefly) in the face of the terror and the defeat and, in the end, death.    

In fact, Green Screen is a Beckett-tinged work of cheerful if rueful nihilism.   ‘There was a good feeling… even though nothing happened’ is not a thousand miles from:

VLADIMIR: That passed the time.

ESTRAGON: It would have passed in any case.

VLADIMIR: Yes, but not so rapidly.

Ms Gunn directs the show and is responsible, with Gwen Holmberg-Gilchrist, for production design.  Ms Holmberg-Gilchrist also does the lighting design.  The sound design, by Duane Morrison, creates an ironic counterpoint to the characters’ small concerns via an ominous sense of impending doom, followed by doom itself.

I wish I could commend the talented cast individually, but no character is named in the program so I cannot say who plays the woman who speaks Italian throughout, who plays the man in the woolly hat, and so on.  The performers, however – apart from Ms Gunn – are Nat Cursio, Tom Davies, Jonno Katz and Kerith Manderson-Galvin.  As is so often the case with this sort of internally devised presentation, the talent of the performers per se exceeds the material they have invented and deliver.  Every time one is delighted by a moment in performance, it’s succeeded by a wish that these people, even Ms Gunn, might some day stumble on something worthy of their abilities.  While the resilience, originality and invention of myriad independent and fringe companies can only be admired, a fair amount of indulgence is required – but it appears to be an indulgence the audience on opening night for Green Screen was mostly prepared to extend.

Michael Brindley