I and the Village
Theatre503
12 June 2015
4 Stars
Review by James Garden
As one enters Theatre503, one instantly is aurally stimulated with the intense rushings of John Adams’ Shaker Songs for strings—a piece of contemporary composition that both assaults and sooths. It demands attention, yet simultaneously entices.
Such is also the case for the play and production I and the Village, currently playing at this southwest hub of new writing. It may be the best piece of new writing you’ll see at a pub theatre this year. Written by Silva Semerciyan, an American turned permanent resident of the UK, she elucidates a distinctly American problem—mental illness and all too readily available firearms—with a precision unseen in many new works. The text is knowing, without being too esoteric.
I and the Village takes place in two simultaneous timelines. First, a retrospective of sorts, as a theatre company investigates the fictitious Michigan massacre, to eventually perform a work based around it “sort of like the Laramie Project, but better.”
Second, we follow Aimée, our victim/assailant, through the events leading up to the critical moment. Similar to The Laramie Project, we have a small company of actors, or Congregants as the play suggests, who play every role, with Aimée, masterfully played by Chloe Harris, as the only character who retains stage presence throughout. Every congregant plays their central part and switches between other parts with great dexterity.
The accents in the production are firmly in that wonderfully bizarre quasi-Canadian place as found in the north central parts of the US, and Nic Redman, the dialect coach, should be applauded for her work. Very few productions of American work in London (or even on the BBC) actually get the accents right—more often sounding like a weird Brooklyn thing out of Newsies, even if the play takes place in Boston or LA—but this production has done it, for the most part, correctly.
Jess Curtis’ design for the production firmly amplifies the work in ways that do not intrude on the text, yet utterly compliment it.
If there is one critique of the production itself, without giving away the spectacular ending of the piece, one wishes the climax could be a bit less shouty. This is a small space, and variation in intensity in such moments is key for maximum effect. But this is nitpicking.
I and the Village is a spectacular evening at the theatre.
Go see it, now.
