Interiors at the Lyric

In Interiors the audience are separated from the performers by a clear plastic wall. This does two things: it serves to emphasise the inherent voyeurism of the onlookers and it also acts as a silencer so that the audience cannot hear what the characters say, they can only sit and watch.

Inspired by Maurice Maeterlinck's symbolist play Interior, Vanishing Point’s production is set in an unnamed northern country where the nights are long and people require rifles to venture outdoors.

It is in fact the longest night of the year and a dinner party is being thrown to mark the occasion by Andrew, an elderly gent in a red waistcoat and silk neckerchief.

Various friends arrive including middle-aged Myra who affects to know much about wine; thirty-something couple Aurora and Barnaby; tall, awkward Damir, a stranger to most of those present; and Davide the boyfriend of Sara, Andrew's granddaughter.
Despite the surreal touch of the rifles in the corner it’s a very familiar, domestic set-up: corks are popped, gifts are given, pleasantries are exchanged. Except, of course, the audience hears none of this and the absence of dialogue allows for a keener focus on the interactions of the characters, the small gestures, the hidden grimaces, the forced smiles.

At first events unfold in near-silence, the only sound the whirling wind and snow outside the house, but after a while a woman’s voice begins to comment on what’s going on. Her tone is gently mocking, a little mischievous; she is eventually revealed to the audience as a figure in white, like them an outsider looking in. This woman directly addresses the audience, pausing to stare in at the windows.

Though experimental in form, the production manages at the same time to be a hugely entertaining and accessible thing, very, very funny in places especially when a degree of wine has flowed and, warm of blood, Aurora and Barnaby start dancing exuberantly to Video Killed The Radio Star (though the dialogue can’t be heard, the audience can hear the music). It’s also very poignant, at times quite acutely moving: an unwise proposal is rejected, a relationship that has barely bloomed starts to fade.

The international cast work well together; resisting the urge to overplay the visual, their movements and interactions feel natural, necessary. The production as a whole has the appeal of a walk through a city at night, all those small human stories unfolding in lit windows, a family sitting down to dinner, a couple watching television, everyday occurrences that become fascinating at a remove, viewed fleetingly through glass.

By the end of its 80 minutes, it does end up overstating its case a bit, hammering keys that before had been struck softly, tugging a little too forcefully on emotional strings, but this doesn’t dull its message that for all the pain, regret and disappointment in life, both big (the loss of love) and small (the receiving of pork stew for dinner when you’re a vegetarian) once you’re on the outside there’s no going back.

Reviewed for musicOMH.

Future Perfect

Lyric Hammersmith again yesterday. This time to the smaller Studio space for Vanishing Point’s new production, Subway. This is one that had been glittering near the top of my list of post-Edinburgh transfers which I was determined to catch, mainly I must admit, due to the prospect of a seven-piece Kosovan band providing the music.

The play offers up a vision of a futuristic Edinburgh where the gulf between rich and poor has widened to the point where the ill and uninsured buy lottery tickets for hospital treatment and the vending machines offer advice on getting your all important eight-a-day while declining to serve Irn Bru to the unemployed. The plot is a slivery thing: after a ten year absence from the city, Patrick returns with hopes of some sort of reconciliation with his estranged father. However it’s superbly played by Sandy Grierson, as Patrick, and Rosalind Sydney, as pretty much everyone else. Everything about the production is well choreographed and well executed and the music provided by the onstage band complemented the action wonderfully, drawing out the internal music of the Scottish accents, creating beautiful patterns from words.

This is a production that revels in language in such a way I was easily able to overlook its narrative flaws. (The plot became unnecessarily convoluted, I thought, as the piece progressed and the dystopian imagery wasn’t exactly fresh). But the marriage of music and performance worked perfectly, each element of the staging was in harmony and none of the theatrical devices felt tacked on or gimmicky, as they did in The Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents.

So, yes, good, I liked this one a lot. It was also interesting to note that, as a result I suspect of the presence of the Kosovan musicians, the audience contained an unusually large percentage of eastern Europeans. And much of the post-show debate that I heard appeared to revolve around the, er, intensity of the actors’ Scottish accents and the difficulty in understanding everything that was said. Still, despite the lost-in-translation factor, the overall buzz seemed to be positive.

In things un-theatre, my weekend was spent in Brussels (to mark, what I believe is politely termed, a landmark birthday for my mother). We shopped, we ate, we drank of the Kriek and of the Hoegaarden and failed to do anything at all cultural or mind-widening. Our waistlines on the other hand…