Writer: Tristan Bernays
Director: Lucy Jane Atkinson
As the show opens we are presented with an arresting image: five people seated in a small church room, the arrangement of chairs suggesting an AA meeting or some kind of group therapy; with the woman at the head (Desireé Rodriguez) as the guidance counsellor or group facilitator. She is singing as the play begins, a gospel song that tells of loss and pain. As the song ends, the first of the people around the circle begins to speak; knowing the play to be a re-imagining of four biblical stories, we wait to discover which character this is.
Doron JéPaul Mitchell tells of an anguished estrangement from a once beloved father, and as he picks his way back through painful memory we realise that this is Isaac, whose father Abraham showed himself willing to sacrifice his son at God’s command. Through Mitchell’s skilful and restrained performance, we are taken back to meet the haunted and forsaken child that still lives within him.
As he stops speaking, the counsellor/chorus begins to sing and he joins in, falteringly, before the song comes to a close, and the next two speakers begin their joint story. The formal, tri-partite structure of the piece becomes clear at this point, but it is also when conviction begins to leak away, as the quiet focus of the first performance is supplanted by the clamour of the next. These are Lot’s daughters: two seemingly loud, assured sisters, whose bond is so strong they finish one another’s sentences.
This splitting of the story across two characters makes the narration feel rather mannered, and their strongly Southern accents seem unnecessarily hammy. The intention is doubtless to create a dramatic contrast between their initial brash confidence and the quietness of the pain that is gradually revealed, but the shift in registers from the first story feels jarring.
There’s also a problem with the shifts between contemporary specificity and biblical abstraction in the world they describe: the initial detail about Thanksgiving dinners and the bustle of big families works to place them in a concrete reality but their memories of their father and the destruction of their hometown segues into a level of abstraction that doesn’t convince.
The third and final story of the penitent criminal, is much more compelling, and the world making more successful. Biko Eisen-Martin ranges from sullen to grief stricken, examining with modulated precision the appalling crushing of personhood effected by life in prison. The dialogue he enacts between one inmate and another is particularly effective, although elements of the lighting design (red for one character, blue for the other) are somewhat heavy handed, and unnecessary given the actor’s skill in delineating between the two.
The individual stories are effective, exploring common themes of betrayal and grief, but they fail to cohere, and the implications around the part played by religion in these failures of relationship are not sufficiently worked through. There is also too much pressure upon the musical interludes to stitch the stories together. Music can clearly do a lot to provide resonance, and depth, but here the songs fail to summon any real emotion.
We might see an implication here about the failure of music to create communion: as the characters try and mostly fail to join in with the songs. So, perhaps the failure to cohere is a deliberate formal choice: one that reflects our stubborn separateness and the particularity of pain.
Runs here until 24 April 2021
The Reviews Hub Score
Disjointed
