Here are two poles of British theatre: the aesthetically free-wheeling, and the socially urgent. Despite the ravages of lockdown, things are not looking too bad.
It was time Punchdrunk took a new turning – and they have. Viola’s Room is a departure for the immersive magicians, led by artistic director Felix Barrett. It is not only that, after the spacious grandeur of The Burnt City, this is a surprisingly intimate show. More fundamentally, audiences are not asked to follow performers independently, deducing a story from fragments of action, but are guided into experiencing the same series of events. Everyone should share one version. Actually, it is not quite as simple as that.
Entering a canvas labyrinth in small groups, spectators are told to follow the light. In fact Viola’s Room is composed of different illuminations: the wonderful lighting by Simon Wilkinson which steers us through Casey Jay Andrews’s design proves that light is not a single thing. It can be the soft overhead radiance from dangling cotton-wool puffballs or the bright gleam through a doorway. It can suggest a personality – a scatter of red fairy bulbs around a girl’s looking-glass. It can dazzlingly carve out new places: a miniature palace is created in an alcove when a golden glow pricks out a series of casements and offers a glimpse of shadowy waltzing couples.
The idea of being led by light is not straightforward. Religious overtones are turned upside down in the course of this dance-with-the-devil promenade, while in a first for visually driven Punchdrunk, audiences are actually instructed by sound in the significance of what they see as they walk (and in one instance crawl). Through headphones, they hear Gareth Fry’s shivering soundtrack, which includes music by Massive Attack and Tori Amos, and Daisy Johnson’s spin on Barry Pain’s gothic tale The Moon-Slave. Heavier on adjectival evocation than on plotting, this adventure includes a last-minute escape from a marriage and nods to Hans Christian Andersen’s terrifying The Red Shoes: pale pink ballet slippers appear throughout the journey, framed like installations or dangling from a shoe tree.
Whispering is filling the theatre at the moment: heard in Bluets, in Jamie Lloyd’s Romeo and Juliet, in Max Webster’s Macbeth. Helena Bonham Carter’s susurrated narration has the cosy bedtime edge taken off it by a slight rasp in her voice, and her knowingness. Which is as it should be. Though often exquisite, sometimes apparently folkloric, Viola’s Room is sophisticated in its paradoxes. Its story is about compulsion and loss of control, yet this is the show in which Punchdrunk has most evidently controlled its own audience.
A View from the Bridge seems to me the most rewarding of Arthur Miller’s plays. This is partly a question of expectation. The drama does not – as does Death of a Salesman – stagger under the burden of an everyman figure. It is less challenged by political updating than The Crucible. It has such an unexpected core. A Greek tragedy set in Brooklyn in the 1950s, its plot pivots on the obsession of a middle-aged longshoreman with his teenage niece. It is alive with doom.
The dramatic strangeness was rendered viscerally in Ivo van Hove’s peeled-back slab-of-meat Young Vic production nine years ago. It is apparent even in Lindsay Posner’s more stolid production. The pace is deliberate. Martin Marquez’s introduction as the narrator is stiff; Peter McKintosh’s design – brown tenement buildings with iron stairways – secures the setting but does little to create claustrophobia. Nevertheless, there is a growing sense of dislocation. The evening is vivid where it most matters. In the central performances.
Dominic West is a terrific Eddie, not least because – yes, he is the same actor who became Prince Charles in The Crown – he makes you believe he has put a day in on the docks. He begins as physically relaxed as a big cat; as his anguish grows, he becomes a blood blister of a man: dark in the face, heavy-limbed, ready to burst. His unfulfilled desire – his inability to acknowledge what he feels – stains his own life and the lives of those around him. Kate Fleetwood is beautifully subtle and shrewd as the cast-aside woman who does not stop loving her husband. Her reactions are under the skin – her eyes flicking, mouth narrowing as unhappiness drains her colour – yet out of the slit of her lips comes strong truth. Nia Towle makes a lovely passionate debut as the desired niece.
It struck me for the first time how radically all the characters are displaced, psychologically or physically; how they look with wonder or horror on those who live differently. The trigger of the tragedy is the arrival of Italian immigrants without legal documentation: one of them jealously denounced by Eddie as being no man, because he can cook. The end – with betrayal, authorities pounding on the door, and bloodshed – carries a terrible warning for today.
Star ratings (out of five)
Viola’s Room ★★★★
A View from the Bridge ★★★
