It is eerily fitting that a dystopian tale in which books are banned and writers are under threat of having their hands amputated is staged in one of Manchester’s most revered libraries. For the Manchester international festival, Maxine Peake, Sarah Frankcom and Imogen Knight have co-adapted Kay Dick’s recently re-issued 1977 novel to stage within John Rylands Library’s gloomy, grand neogothic interior.
The story, delivered as a dramatised reading by Peake, is of a world in which culture is obliterated by authoritarian forces and artists criminalised. Peake plays a poet who sees horrors unfold around her, and encounters artists who have been punished for their art (painters blinded, musicians made deaf) and those who resist. The nave-like room is the perfect place for the piece, housing such precious tomes as an early manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and a fragment of The Gospel of John, and symbolically infusing books with a sense of the sacred.
The stage is arranged as a narrow traverse which Peake walks along, quiveringly, throwing sheaves of script on the floor. She is pale and shoeless, but there is a controlled inner outrage to her character as she speaks of fellow artists who are intent on congregating and creating work despite the risks. In between telling her story she stops to repeat the names of the dead and it feels liturgical.
Reports of violence come in flashes: dogs with broken necks, writers whose hands are forced into fires. Peake is caught within the harsh glare of Amy Mae’s lighting design, which spotlights her as if in an interrogation. Her voice carries the hollow edge of the library’s acoustics and Melanie Wilson’s composition and sound design builds dread.
They is thoroughly atmospheric and bears obvious resonances to erosions of creative freedoms around the world today. But at under an hour, it is rather too short and sketchy, with a narrative arc which creates intrigue but does not stretch very far.
We hear that love and nonconformity are outlawed and want more detail. Peake wonders if her group of friends can simply create for themselves, leaving paintings to hang in their studios, which begs questions around what and who art is for, but the show does not delve further.
It is testimony to Peake’s powerful delivery that we are left wanting more. She reels us in, as she always does and holds us in a state of bated breath.
• At John Rylands Library, Manchester, until 9 July. Manchester international festival runs until 16 July.
