REVIEW: Torn Apart, Theatre N16 ✭✭✭✭

Torn Apart

Theatre N16

14 September 2016

Book Tickets

Theatre N16 have done it again.  Once more, this enterprising and innovative theatre collective in up-and-coming Balham, based in rooms at the rambling and lofty pub, The Bedford, have brought in another new company offering surprising and brilliantly produced new work.  B J McNeill is the writer and director here of a remarkable new play that pits three different couples against each other in the same generic space: a bedroom.  Or is it?  The room, in a design by architect Szymon Ruszczewski, is sequestered from the audience by a large wooden framework, strung from floor to ceiling with strings, approximating the outer walls and ceiling of the space and resembling a cage; yet the floor of this ‘room’, on closer inspection, reveals itself to be a dancefloor; furthermore, the ‘string’ walls are often plucked, or strummed, or toyed with, by the characters.  Clearly, all is not quite as it seems.

A sequence of duologues unfolds between these couples.  The first of these, a playing scene of love-making, is boldly naturalistic in style – quite unlike the partly expressionistic staging.  It is in full swing as the audience arrives: eventually, the stage lighting intensifies, and the house lights dim, and we are in the opening of the play.  A US soldier, Simon Donohue, and his Polish squeeze, Nastazja Somers, are cavorting in a carefree scene: it seems a pragmatic arrangement, mutually beneficial, between a resident of East Berlin and a visiting NATO serviceman, during the closing stages of the Cold War.   The soldier has to observe the curfew and after the witching hour cannot remain in the territory of the GDR.   Inevitably, this strains the relationship.  We watch its gradual deterioration.

Intercut with this, are scenes from two other common law marriages: in the 1990s, in the UK, an Englishman, Elliott Rogers, wants to keep his Australian girlfriend, Christina Baston, but she – after the expiry of her two-year visa – must return to the other side of the world (he offers marriage, repeatedly, but she refuses to marry ‘for convenience’); and then, in the present day, also in England, there are the newly gay or bisexual, Sarah Hastings, and her more experienced, more worldly lover, Monty Leigh, who is then diagnosed with a serious illness, imperilling the continuity of that particular relationship.  We are asked to observe, listen to and reflect upon the lives of these people, with all the cool Brechtian intellectualism we can muster; yet, the often extreme realism of what we see constantly seeks to break down our reserve and demand our direct emotional commitment to these people: the sustained tension between two contrary dramatic attitudes is one of the delights of this piece.

Within a tidily harmonious palette of white, black and flesh tones, combined with flashes of burnt umber and khaki for the US serviceman, these couples fuse linguistically, as well as narratively.   Lines recur sporadically across the boundaries of time and place, sometimes being spoken simultaneously on stage by characters from different narratives; in fact, whole pages of dialogue emerge out of a ‘collage’ of voices, ingeniously chiming sympathetically with each other, even though emanating from wholly separate destinies.  Or, are they?  As we progress, we hear more and more details that seem to link these characters together, as if they had strayed from a latter-day Priestley, investigating the strange coincidences driven by the predictability of human ambitions.

Switching us from one time to another, we often hear music germane to the era we are entering: the same, archaic, portable onstage radio achieves the same effect.  Topical references clog the discourse of these ostensibly free agents, all of whom seem trapped in a Sartrean hell of McNeill’s making.  The threat of violence and the animal baseness of sex are omnipresent as if Pinter were directing everything.  The ‘novelty’ of the production, therefore, still seems to rest upon a detailed and passionate involvement with the great modern tradition of theatre.

The players themselves, very interestingly, mainly come from less conventional routes into the industry, including the Brian Timoney Actors’ Studio at The Courtyard, Hoxton.  And over the past two years, the play has developed into the work we see today.  The style of performance is broadly speaking naturalistic – except when it is not: occasionally, some of the characters move in a theatrically gestural way, but they are more likely to smooch in touchingly simple embraces.  There is sometimes a rawness to the action, an absence of polish, but it is always convincing and involving: in fact, the wonderful paradox here is that, as the play progresses, becoming sometimes very fragmented and disjointed, the compelling is its overall effect.  Scenes seem to contract in scope and duration, making the ‘applique’ technique of layering them on top of each other almost – but not quite – bewildering, until, finally, the conclusion, so tightly compressed, is devastating in its emotional power.

So, No Offence Theatre is another great addition to the field.  Make your way down to Balham to see this fascinating, thought-provoking drama.

BOOK TICKETS FOR TORN APART