As the audience walk into the odd space of Lefel 1 of St. David’s Hall to take their seats, they are confronted with a bleak stage containing one actor chained to a cement block; restrained apart from a few feet – enough room to carry out minimal exercise and clear moments of overtly theatrical torment. Imposed upon the apt beigeness of the stage are various images of news items pertaining to various terrorist activities; from the 1982-92 Lebanese hostage crisis, from the experience of which the play is derived, to the IRA bombings of the Grand Hotel in Brighton; the host of the Conservative party conference of October 1984.
Frank McGuinness’ play presents a kind of situational existentialism in the most extreme of dangerous and claustrophobic circumstances any human could endure. McGuinness’ text ponders human existence and emotion; from desperation to delusion optimism. He presents a proverbial musical score which unfortunately in this instance was not used to its fullest potential.
Human Compass’ production has all the tropes of an Americanised version of Constantine Stanislavski’s method of psychological realism without, unfortunately, the conviction needed to bring alive the physical and auditory nature of McGuinness’ text. As I’ve said earlier the text itself deals with human emotion therefore it is not necessary to do this with the acting approach/method. An exploration of the performativity and textuality would have been better positioned to explore the nature of the conditions the playwright presents us with.
There were some fine moments from each of the actors – such as Adam’s (Matthew Curran) speech on power and the palpable nationalistic tension between the Irishman Eddy (Owen Lindsay), and the Englishman Michael (Terry Jermyn), albeit with some travelling accents. Sadly, there was a sense that these moments were arbitrarily stitched together; this is incongruent with the well crafted musicality of McGuinness’ text. This is because psychological realism works in real time – potentially useful for the likes of Ibsen or Chekov but less so for plays that make big temporal shifts of months at a time. This leads to restriction of physicality and voice: denoting one psychological state despite the passage of time.
The staging was kept simple and this enabled the play to progress with a decent flow and gave the spatial openness needed to facilitate some lovely moments of play-acting and fantasy within the production. However, this was often interrupted by multimedia images that added nothing to the text and ultimately limited the imaginative quality of the performance of such moments. This didactic device suggests that the Director (James Robert Auheb) does not trust his audience to make necessary connections to see ‘his vision’.
Plays are written, for the most part at least, to be performed. The reason for this is that the performance adds something to what would otherwise remain a literary piece of work. Sadly for me, I am struggling to see what Human Compass have added that I would not have got from reading the play itself.
Runs until April 18th