Tryst, Videotape, Elysian Fields

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on TRYST (Grid Iron at Engoyholmen, Stavanger), VIDEOTAPE at Oran Mor, Glasgow, and ELYSIAN FIELDS at the Arches, Glasgow, for Scotsman Review, 17.10.08
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Tryst   4 stars ****
Videotape   3 stars ***
Elysian Fields   3 stars ***

ON THE QUAYSIDE at Stavanger, darkness has fallen, and the lights of the city are sparkling in the still water of one of Norway’s busiest ports, full of tall ferries and looming North Sea supply ships.  Then a strange, compulsive sound begins to echo across the water, the sucking thump and heartbeat of an old marine steam engine; and round the stern of a ship comes the puffer Hundvaag 1, all lit with oil lamps, and come to take an audience of 25 or so out to the island of Engoyholmen, ten minutes away across the harbour.  Engoyholmen is part working boat-yard, part cultural and craft centre for men and boys in search of peace of mind; and this week, it’s also the setting for the latest show by leading Scottish theatre group Grid Iron, presented as part of the Scottish-Norwegian North Sea Project that forms a key element of Stavanger 2008, this year’s celebration of the city as a Capital of Culture and Open Port.

So it’s more than appropriate that for this special occasion, Grid Iron have finally brought to birth an idea that the company has been brooding on for almost a decade: the idea of a show about the obsession with the sea – as real natural force, and deep  emotional metaphor – that unites the cultures of all the nations of northern Europe, including Ireland, Scotland, England and Norway, from which the current Grid Iron company come.  Tryst is a modern story of marriage, parenthood, betrayal, and loss, told through the words and imagery of four mighty existing texts about the sea and its destructive power  – texts ranging from  Alexander Trocchi and Pierre Loti to Oscar Wilde’s fairytale of The Fisherman And His Soul and Kipling’s Harp-Song Of The Dane Women, bereft time and again by “the old grey widow-maker,” the ocean.

The show’s main weakness lies in the slight mismatch between the sheer poetic strength of the stories and legends writer-director Ben Harrison weaves around his tale, and the relative banality of the modern story of two couples struggling to deal with the death of a child, and tempted by mutual adultery. There are moments when the collision between the bourgeois world of Tom Stoppard and the world of ancient myth and legend seems a shade ridiculous; and it’s an impression compounded by the show’s failure to attempt anything like a strongly bilingual approach to the story, although Stavanger  audiences – true to the Open Port theme – seem happy enough to hear a performance in English.

In terms of the telling of the tale, though, Tryst is a thrilling visual and sensual experience, from the moment when the boat pulls up to the magically-lit island jetty.  Becky Minto’s design and Paul Claydon’s lighting are often breathtaking, transforming the tiny island into a magical landscape of marine and domestic imagery – four great white sails soaring into the darkness here, a lit window there – and making brilliant use both of the gleaming shapes of the boats under construction, and of the beams, ladders and long attics of the workshop building.   Conrad Ivitsky Molleson’s music and sound is eloquent and beautiful; the rich smell of wood, varnish and sea-water unforgettable.  And at the core of the show, there is a beautiful, complex performance from Kjersti Botn Sandal as Lyra, the raging bereaved mother; with strong, hard-working support from Iain Parker as her husband, and David Ireland and Nicola Harrison as their friends Otto and Iona, lovers, rivals, and – sometimes – their most hated enemies.

This week’s show in the Oran Mor lunchtime season also features modern middle-class people facing the fact of death.   In Oliver Emanuel’s Videotape, Sam Young and Robert Jack play a young live-in couple apparently on the point of breaking up.  They speak but do not answer each other; he goes out without her, and she follows, desperate for the truth about his life.  As the play evolves, though, it gradually becomes clear that this is no ordinary split, and that her distance from him is more than emotional.   It’s a pretty hackneyed theme for modern yuppie drama, from Truly, Madly, Deeply onwards.   But Emanuel writes sharply, eloquently, and sometimes beautifully, from the perspectives of both the dead and the living; and director Joe Douglas elicits fine performances from both actors, in one of the more promising shows of the current Play, Pie and Pint season.

At the Arches, meanwhile, Glasgow writer Derek McLuckie kicks off this year’s Tennessee-Williams-themed Glasgay! Festival with Elysian Fields, a hectic one-hour meditation on “The Life and Curious Death” of the great playwright, as seen in old age.  Focussing like Tryst and Videotape on the inevitable fact of death, McLuckie’s show is not so much a play as a half-controlled explosion of rebellious camp sensibility, strikingly designed by Kirsty Hogg in flurries of white muslim, with a giant Gone With The Wind crinoline-frame.   It features fierce dramatic verse, a chorus of three fearsomely fit-looking boys who act as lovers and nurses, and frequent visits from a thoroughly over-the-top Pauline Goldsmith as a mouthy version of Vivien Leigh, screen star of A Streetcar Named Desire.

What the show fitfully captures, though, despite its occasional messiness, is the truth that Williams was the ultimate adult in matters of mortality.  He knew that that physical decay and death  is the common lot of humankind.   And he also knew that the pain of dying is the price we pay for the joy and vividness of life; a price that makes the abuse of life and the suppression of joy and freedom all the more unforgivable, and worth opposing with all our strength, to the last.

Tryst at Engoyholmen, Stavanger, until 25 October; Videotape at Oran Mor, Glasgow, and Elysian Fields at the Arches, Glasgow, both until 18 October.

ENDS ENDS ENDS

~ by joycemcmillan on October 17, 2008.