REVIEW: Abyss, Arcola Theatre ✭✭✭✭

Abyss

Arcola Theatre Studio 2

4 Stars

Many years ago I visited Berlin shortly after wall came down. I have always had an interest the homes and work-places of writers and composers, so after exhausting the obvious headline sights I decided to visit the Brecht-Weigel Museum, where the DDR's theatrical power couple spent their final years. It was a depressing time to go: funding for the museum and the Berliner Ensemble itself was in doubt, and the loyal curator had not been paid in months. Yet the house itself still spoke eloquently of the contradictions of its famous owner. The plays and essays that had sought to disconcert audiences into fresh thought about the social role of theatre and banish tired reliance on mere narrative and the textual development of character - all these were on display to be sure. But when you went into Brecht's austere little bedroom, there, to my amazement, above the narrow single bed, was a whole long row of well-thumbed paperback thrillers, westerns, and detective fiction, kept like a secret stash of bons-bons, as an off-duty tribute to the primacy of plot. This experience surfaced in my mind during the the recent run of ABYSS at the Arcola, Studio 2, where the question of the role of narrative versus abstract emotion is very much to the fore. This play started life a few years ago in the Deutsches Theater, Berlin as Brandung. It is still playing there too, but in the meantime has also moved to Toronto with some revisions, and from there now to London. It has acquired some extra narrative infill along the way, but still is essentially a piece of regisseur theatre where the focus is more on conveying the emotional states of the performers through movement, sound and text, as much if not more than through text, which is in any case more incantatory than expository. The key question therefore is how successful is the piece on these terms: is this self-limitation enabling and revealing, or restrictive and impoverishing? The answer, as so often, is not clear-cut.

The rectangular space of Studio 2 is laid out simply, with three banks of seats, a wall of suspended light bulbs facing us, and a large table in the middle of the space. Two trapeze bars are either side suspended from the ceiling. The table is in many ways the centre-piece of the action, used flexibly for scenes of conflict, and reconciliation, and as a place of refuge, and stylised sacrifice. There is a great deal of impressively elaborate movement exploring all dimensions of the space that produces tableaus of dramatic power and poetic concentration that would be so if we were simply witnessing an artistic installation rather than a play. The light bulbs on the back wall pulse and dim in different combinations as a mute commentary upon and intensification or mood music for the action. Great credit belongs to the movement director, Anna Morrissey, and the lighting designer, Ziggy Jacobs, in these respects.

There are three players and four characters, some of them more in search of an author than others. The narrator figure, who is unnamed, (Nicola Kavanagh) is sharing an apartment in an unnamed German city with her sister, Sofia, (Jennifer English) and a man of joint Serbian and Croatian parentage, Vlado, (Iain Batchelor). Batchelor also plays Jan the narrator's new boyfriend. Absent throughout is Karla, the final member of this flat-share, and girlfriend of Vlado. Her departure is the point at which the action begins. She has popped out for supplies and never returns. The action is punctuated by a count of days since her departure given in German. The narrator takes us through a sequence of reactions to the disappearance of a close friend - disbelief, attempts to convince the police to take the case seriously and finally (when they won't) attempts by all the friends to raise awareness in social and print media and go searching for the missing person themselves. These more traditional aspects are punctuated by Sofia described the killing, preparation, cooking and serving of a rabbit which serves as a symbolic commentary on the events that are hinted at but never fully presented to us. The atmosphere and tone darkens further in the second half of the evening as the attention of the players shifts away from externalities towards the world of memory and personal responsibility as they recall earlier and happier times and events in Karla's company. How reliable are the accounts we are receiving, and who if anyone should receive our trust? The final answers are largely left to us to determine.

All the players take the opportunities given them with passion and grace: English provides an angry choric commentary on the action much of the time full of a feisty survivor's disdain for the impossible circumstances they find themselves in; while Kavanagh, who has most text to play with, ably conveys the succession of moods that an unexplained disappearance provokes - disbelief, anger at not being taken seriously, desperation and despair, and survivor guilt. As Vlado, Batchelor digs deeper still with a portrayal of a troubled and troubling figure, clearly damaged by his conflicted upbringing in Yugoslavia, and experiencing the fragmentation of personality associated with someone encountering racism and daily disrespect on top of the loss of a primary core identity. He has much less to work with in his depiction of Jan, and while the performances are successfully distinguished from one another, if the play lost this character it would in fact gain more focus and overall momentum.

The deliberate refusal of narrative answers until near the end of the play is therefore both the challenge and the opportunity provided by author and director. On the whole the rewards outweigh the frustrations. The performers offer a powerful poetic eloquence that compels attention and leaves us a lot of space as audience members within which to reflect on the big issues this play poses - how is trust assembled and broken down and reassembled? What can we know in a crisis even of those whom we have lived with for a long time in adversity? How can witnesses to the same events produce such differing memories with apparent sincerity? Above all, in times of adversity, what parts of our own characters will come to the fore.. the most tempered and courageous, or the most abject and cowardly?

But in the end the tension between the daily count of the passage of time and the avoidance of narrative direction is too much to sustain and in the final sections we return to a more predictable expositional technique with a measure of relief. Moreover, the performances of the actors notably relax once the abstract, staccato almost hieratic formalism gives way to a more naturalistic presentation. Variety of tone and form is not the enemy of thought after all. We need our thrillers and westerns too. My only major cavil is that the interval is quite unnecessary: the play would be far better off with a straight run-through. But don't let this deter you: this is a fascinating evening of great skill and seriousness, one of those where what you get out of it is proportionate to what you are prepared to put in......

Abyss runs at the Arcola Theatre until April 25, 2015