THE DYING OF TODAY | STAGE REVIEW
The Other Room, Porter’s Bar, Cardiff, Thurs 26 March
February 2015 saw a new pub theatre emerge on the Cardiff scene with some of the most audacious programming imaginable to launch their project of producing ‘ambitious world class theatre with an international reach’.
The creation of artistic director Kate Wasserberg and executive director Bizzy Day, The Other Room started life with a brave and compelling version of Sarah Kane’s modern classic Blasted. They follow this up with a production of a Howard Barker play, and I’m already looking forward to seeing what this wonderful new addition to the Cardiff theatre scene comes up with for its next show.
Barker’s play The Dying Of Today takes as its inspiration the utter defeat and enslavement of the Athenian fleet in Syracuse in 413 BC, and the subsequent relaying of that news to the Athenian populace by a sailor in a barber’s shop. The play explores the impact of ‘bad news’, both upon the teller and the told, and the moral and ethical stances that we adopt in relation to hearing, and acting upon, the worse news imaginable.
Barker’s play takes place inside the setting of the Barber’s shop with the arrival of the character of Dneister, who manipulates the Barber to envisage the worst news imaginable, with terrible personal consequences.
As with all of Barker’s plays, the dramatic power lies in the poetry of the spoken word. In this the production succeeds in communicating the complexity of the dialogue, although at times the nuances of language were lost amidst flashes of anger. But the pathos of the Barber’s situation becomes clear through his realisation of the truth of his story, and Christian Patterson plays this with dignity and thoughtfulness as the horror begins to unfold before him.
Dressed like a preppy dilettante out of a GQ photo shoot, Leander Deeny plays Dneister with insouciant arrogance, forcing the Barber to bear the weight of his suffering but also in the end realizing the futility of his own role and actions in the unfolding catastrophe.
In this he literally misses the boat that would take him to safety and his next engagement of bearing bad news. Communicating wryly through the use of the Barber’s ‘fourth wall’ mirror that allows them to speak to each other whilst looking (at times unnervingly) directly into the audience, Deeny and Patterson carry the rhythms of Barker’s brilliant dialogue to its inevitable conclusion: “only grief could give you such authority”.
In terms of design the set was a little bit too sparkling new for my liking, with little sense of the Barber’s rustic history as a soldier contained in the plush surroundings, except for a large wooden case used to store key props and the debris that results from the telling of bad news. The use of music also seemed a little out of place within the setting of the play. But the direction by Kate Wasserberg probes the text with invention and wit and it is always refreshing to see a professional production by someone of Barker’s repute in Cardiff. Theatre needs voices like his in order to present us with moral dilemmas that we would prefer not to engage with. As the Barber notes, “it is so hard not to be a slave”.
words ALEX WREN photos PALLASCA PHOTOGRAPHY