Shelf Life
The Old Library, Swansea
Until Sun 25 Apr
***
The next chapter of National Theatre Wales’ programme might as well have been ripped out of another book. Gone are the populist, accessible elements of A Good Night Out In The Valleys in favour of a fragmented elegy for libraries. A piece of immersion theatre set in Swansea’s old library, it features the Welsh National Opera, a setting that’s somewhere between a Greek Deipnosophistae banquet and the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, a piece of interpretive dance, and a frame of literary reference so vast it stretches from Homer to Spike Milligan. Almost everything about this tribute to the power of the printed word screams highbrow.
The play opens in the courtyard behind the library, where a scatterbrained librarian is washing the pages of a novel, quoting Dylan Thomas and Spike Milligan at the audience. Actors from the Welsh National Opera arrive and sing a cantata full of elegiac phrases and mourning for the death of the library and the ascendance of the “digital gods”. Led into the library itself, the audience moves from a basement full of empty bookshelves through to the vast, domed library itself, where the cast swap anecdotes and stories with one another over a banquet.
There is a lot for bibliophiles to love about Shelf Life. It’s shamelessly fetishistic in its depiction of books and reading. Books are caressed, washed, quoted endlessly, and treated with the utmost reverence, to the point where, in the domed reading room, the characters strip excitedly, partially (and pretty unsuccessfully) covering their bits with novels. A copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover transports one of the characters back to her first sexual experience, to vivid effect. So it’s safe to say that if you aren’t fond of the printed word you probably won’t enjoy Shelf Life at all, which mocks the inarticulate and uncultured in an early scene involving a girl spoiling for a fight, and whose main segment consists of the cast sitting around a vast banquet firing off anecdotes, facts and musings on novels and novelists.
Frustratingly, this extended riffing is at the expense of the narrative, whose most interesting moments are culled in the rapid exchange of ideas.That Deipnosophistae is something of a metaphor for the play itself, because in much the same way that the characters sit around the table regurgitating trivia and anecdotes, so the play throws up lots and lots of good ideas which are consumed and discarded before they can really develop. All that remains consistent is the rather quaint idea that there is something sinister at stake in the loss of the written word’s material form.
Shelf Life presents a cacophony of information that overwhelms its audience. Like a library, it successfully summons that sublime feeling of being deluged by an impossibly rich and unknowable world. Its finale is haunting and perfectly pitched. But the irony of Shelf Life is that it’s so in thrall to the works of others that it can feel like one huge quotation. For a play that talks so much, it has little to say.