Psychopomp & Seething

As someone said to me after the show, ‘It’s probably best just to let it wash over you.’  Indeed, director & designer Jason Lehane says in a program note: ‘This is a work that one feels before one understands…’  True.  These two otherwise quite different pieces are verbally dense, layered, allusive and – if I dare say so – poetic.  They are highly imaginative, relentless and inaccessible to one’s ‘normal’ theatrical comprehension.  There are stories, but no plots; there are images, but they are metaphors; and there are actors who do not interact.

The two pieces are also, for the audience, inescapably immersive experiences.  The La Mama Courthouse space is radically altered and disorientating.  The audience is restricted to about sixteen spectators who sit on black bleachers in a black box.  To the front, a black curtain blocks the view.  The black box is on wheels.  To a soundtrack of a violent storm, effectively creating a feeling of being buffeted, the black box is wheeled to a new position.  Total blackout.  And then the curtains part, and one is shocked at a whole new perspective and the first piece begins.

Seething is, in fact, first.  There is a narrator/speaker (Vanessa O’Neil) in a recording booth, brightly lit, at some distance up stage.  From behind glass, she weaves in words a kind of dream experience, in direct address to the audience.  Then in the empty space in front of the booth, a compact figure (in foetal position?) rolls onto stage and unfolds into a dancer.  The dream is highly subjective and it moves fast, tumbling over itself, inexorable.  The dancer responds to the dream, but she is subject to the forces of the dream - which creates a feeling of vertigo, of being trapped or paralyzed – and then enveloped and attacked.  It is – or it may be – an allegory of a woman’s life.  There is sensuality, but also stings and stabs of pain.  There are suggestions of sexuality, even rape - black, wet, violent, invasive and malignant.  But the dancer or the dreamer comes through – and finds rest, returning in a way reminiscent of TS Eliot’s ‘…to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time’.  The speaker leaves the booth and approaches the audience, now flesh and blood, as it were. 

The catch here is that the words and the dance don’t quite mesh.  One checks the dance against the words – for accuracy, so to speak.   Ms O’Neil’s controlled and expressive dancing per se is diminished by being illustration of the words rather than expressive in its own right.

Then the space is plunged back into darkness and the black box rumbles to a new position for Psychopomp.  Now the discombobulated audience confronts, almost close enough to touch, four confining compartments – their occupants could neither stand nor lie down – and there is no way out.  Each compartment is individual – a nest, rocks, debris, a tropical hot house – and each contains a storyteller.  Their stories, told in threnodies that begin separately but slowly weave together, are stories of irretrievable loss and grief.  None of the storytellers is aware of the others.  They rage, they muse, they wonder, they regret, locked in memory.  The visual metaphor is clear.  The performers – James Cerche, Nicola Grear, Aislin Murray and Lindsay Templeton - are merely listed in the program, so I cannot be specific, but they are all experienced and accomplished people and lend Ms Bartlau’s text great emotion – even if one storyteller is an owl and an angry owl at that.

This, as you may have gathered, is not an easily accessible night at the theatre.  It is Art and it is up front about it without concessions.  I have no idea what the titles of the two pieces mean.  Please note that the above is my interpretation and may leave these artists gasping at how wrong I am, but note also that I have not used the word ‘pretentious’ (though some will and easily), because it’s not.  It is highly imaginative and distinctly original; it is a fine example of artistic collaboration and, having let it all wash over you, it stays with you and meaning begins to take shape and substance.  Not for the faint hearted or the claustrophobic.

Michael Brindley  

Photographer: Sarah Walker.