Skin In Flames
Park Theatre
13 May 2015
4 Stars
Skin in Flames is the best-known and multiple-award winning work of Catalan writer Guillem Clua. The play was originally produced in 2004 in Barcelona, but apart from a staged reading back in 2007, has never before received a full production here in Britain. This premiere, in an effective translation by DJ Sanders, is very welcome, and certainly overdue. The themes it focuses on – the impact of the mass diffusion of iconic images of violence, the deceptions of memory, whether conscious or unconscious, the ambiguous contributions of first-world international aid organisations, and the unreliability of different narratives of exploitation – take us into the territory occupied by such classics as Kiss of the Spider Woman and Death and the Maiden, and the play experiences no embarrassment alongside such exalted company.
The set in the Park Theatre’s smaller studio space presents us with a rumpled tired-looking bedroom in a cheap hotel, where curtains flutter at an open window, a couple of chairs sit in the foreground and a bathroom leads off at the back. We are in an unidentified Latin American capital city some twenty years on from a bloody revolution or civil war in which the current government ultimately won power. The action commences as distinguished American war-photographer, Frederick Salomon (Almiro Andrade) enters together with a journalist, Hanna (Bea Segura) from one of the state-run newspapers. He was last in this city at the time of the revolution when he took a photo of a young girl thrown through the air by an explosion, which subsequently was taken up by the world’s press as a totemic image of war and the pity of war. It was the image that launched his career. He is back in town for the presentation of an award from the government to be handed over at a formal lunch later in the day. The interview is expected to be an unthreatening, glowing endorsement of a legendary photographer with the exchanges wreathed in pious platitudes on all sides – a meeting representing a comfortable if somewhat patronising encounter between an aspirant and a grand old man of the field. That quickly turns out not to be the case as we move instead into an interrogation of Salomon’s past and of the morality of his whole career and of what that notorious photo really involved for all concerned.
As the shadows lengthen in the hotel room, both literally and metaphorically, a second story begins to develop within the same space. Another couple enter and quickly it becomes clear that this is a sexual encounter or transaction, but there is also complexity and an uneasy sense of exploitation and abuse of power, just as in the parallel dialogue. Ida (Laya Marti) is a young mother, whose daughter lies in a coma in a local hospital. Her bed partner is a senior UN medic who has the power to intervene to get access to medicines for the daughter and even get her transferred for expert care abroad. However he will only do so in return for an ever more degrading set of sexual favours from Ida. It turns out that the doctor is also responsible for organising the award for Salomon, a move that will benefit both their careers back home through the warm glow of humanitarian self-satisfaction in which they can plausibly bask. As the play proceeds the two plot lines operate in the same space firstly in symbolic ways and then with increasingly shocking real-time convergence. It would be wrong to reveal more of the detail but the writer deserves great credit for the way in which he remorselessly brings the stories together in the finale while leaving sufficient threads hanging loose for our imaginations to fill in the remaining gaps in our own way.
For the actors and director in this drama the key task is to chart and sustain a compelling path of development in each character from surface exterior confidence through to emotional disintegration or fragmentation. Each of the players needs to open up a very wide emotional palette but in a precise and carefully calibrated way so that extremes of anger and despair do not peak too soon and so that the many switches of energy, power and control in the drama pursue a credible rather than random course. The audience needs to be constantly reminded of the consistent emotional themes in play while kept guessing as to who is actually telling the truth, or whether there is in fact anything like a unified truth that is available as opposed to mere individual perspectives on the same events. In achieving this delicate balance the women are generally more successful than the men. In Bea Segura and Laya Marti, the production is fortunate in having two well-known Spanish actors at the peak of their game: Marti in particular is extraordinarily moving in the way she depicts her unbounded love for her daughter, and her desperation to grasp at any means to save her. She has far less text to work with than the others, yet she conveys eloquently her suffering and her proud disdain for the cruelties practised on her by Doctor Brown. She also displays a wondrous childish innocence herself in her rendition of a children’s story, which emerges as a point of exceptional multi-layered poignancy in the play as a whole. Segura has to ride a switchback of emotions as she moves from naïve journalist to avenging angel to a final much more ambiguous status, neither manipulator nor victim. She charts this course with finely detailed skill, passionate intensity and verbal precision. David Lee-Jones captures the jaded careerist in Doctor Brown very well, as well as the sense of a man who can only now feel alive through ever more elaborately exploitative sexual kicks. However, his performance would be all the more shocking if he sketched in the back-story of his American family life with more emotional light and shade. Likewise, while Almiro Andrade is very credible in appearance and body language, his performance does not yet fully capture the scope of the journey his character has to travel. We need to see more confident, patronising worldly-wise bluster at the start for us to appreciate the scale of his psychological implosion under the weight of the revelations that lie ahead. Salomon is a man akin to the anti-heroes of Graham Greene, who has ceased to believe in himself long before he unravels in front of us. For the drama to fully work we need to have that hollowness and inner collapse fully enacted, and then his final unexpected recovery too. Some of these issues may work themselves out as the run progresses, as the pace and ease of the interactions increase beyond the early days of Press Night.
This is a tough, uneasy but richly rewarding night in the theatre. We are made to think deeply about the mixed motives that lie behind the implementation of humanitarian intervention, about the power of photo-journalism to shape perceptions around the world for good and bad, and of the way images can develop a received life of their own that transcends any pattern of deliberate intention. It seems merely platitudinous to say that war makes victims, moral or physical, of all its participants, but the great sobering success of the play is to make that truth concrete and complicated, affecting yet meaningful for all the characters in the drama.
