PLAY/SILENCE | STAGE REVIEW

The Other Room at Porter’s, Cardiff

Thu 21 Jan

The Other Room at Porter’s returns for its sophomore season with a quite sensational double bill of two titans of the twentieth century stage. Credit must be given to Kate Wasserberg, Bizzy Day and the rest of the team for starting off with Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter and producing what promises to be a gutsy, audacious and ground breaking season. Whilst both writers are associated with the Theatre of the Absurd movement, they couldn’t be more different in style and tone, and it’s very clever programming to choose these two plays as they form perfect companion pieces, Beckett’s heads in darkness contrasting with Pinter’s aching mediation on loss and desire. Both plays offer us glimpses of an affair, of the deniable truths that come with adultery and the lies and deceits that make up the human condition.

Beckett’s Play opens with three heads, two women and a man, in urns in a darkened space, a spotlight illuminating the talking heads at various stages of the piece. The dialogue is fired off at machine gun pace, following Beckett’s exacting stage directions and creating a mesmerising and hypnotic effect. Wasserberg’s direction is faultless and the performances by Peta Cornish, Victoria John and Matthew Bulgo are all worthy of the brilliant artistic conception and execution. I’ve waited a long time to see this play live and it was worth every second. It’s a dark play both literally and metaphorically; the urns suggesting something of an ancient past but the humdrum, middle-class banality of the affair drags us into an uncomfortable present. Fixed and frozen in time, the heads are doomed to repeat themselves, trapped in the gap between desire and action.

Following a short interval we return to a space utterly transformed. A stunning set design by Amy Jane Cook and lighting design by Katy Morrison takes us into Pinter’s Silence, a dream world inhabited by three characters, reversing the gender balance of Play with two men and a woman. Bulgo (Rumsey) and Cornish (Ellen) are joined by Neal McWilliams (Bates), as the three characters traverse a delicate line between them, interconnected by past events and, like the heads in Play, forced to relive them.  Rumsey and Bates circle Ellen like stars orbiting a sun; age and status separates the men but what connects them is a longing to fix the mistakes of the past. The direction by Titas Halder is subtly precise and sensitive to the ebbs and flows of the characters delicate dialogue; at times you could almost hear breathing in the perfect silences between them. The sound design by Dyfan Jones is suitably unsettling, resounding in the gut as much as the head. Both plays resonate long after the event, a theatre experience that is as beautiful as it is disturbing.

words ALEX WREN