Reviews West End & Central Published 18 November 2011

Salt, Root and Roe

Trafalgar Studios ⋄ November 10th - December 3rd

Nonogenarian nymphs.

Daniel B. Yates

As far as intellectual parlour games went for me and my state-schooled friends, playing Guess Who was about the sum of it. While we imagined our tweedy Oxbridgian peers making one another beautiful by extemporising on the prose of Drieser in between shots of single malt, or drinking games which hinged on the ability to brayingly recall passages of the King James bible in the style of various great generals from military history; we would be drinking cheap lager and asking ourselves whether “Jeff”, with his cartoon head, was the sort of person who might’ve mailed dirty fanmail to himself, destroyed his furniture to build a monument to Alan Sugar, or was manfully ignoring some painfully-rare testicular ailment.

It seems the Cardiff-educated Tim Price was doing something of the same. In Salt, Root and RoeGuess Who makes an appearance: as a game of comedy (“is it the type of person that has a tracker-mortgage?”), and then with an echoey amnesia, and somehow taking on the dimension of a game of chess with death.  Iola and Annet are elderly twins steeped in the mythology of their Welsh homeland, delightfully batty just as they stand longingly on the threshold of death.  Oddly practical and fraily human, at the same time these nonogenarian nymphs seem dished up by hidden sea, recurring witch-like in a liminal space of watery caves and lime-kilns.  A gentler Genet’s maids they conspire in magical thinking and mischief, and the relationship between them and their daughter and niece Menna, a gluey and mistily neurotic Imogen Stubbs, is loving enough while being frustrating, fragmentarily controlling and occasionally violent.

There is a deep and gloaming sense of magical thinking that sits pregnant in Tim Price’s play, balanced by the industry that two older women bring to their patchy and forgetting daily lives. It’s as if someone has poured salt water over the first chapter of Levi Strauss’s Savage Mind, and you can just about make out a myth that was once functionally plenty for a life and its origins, made wistful by modern time. The thickness of experience, and ultimately of death, ultimately cannot be touched by language, and here the atmospherics of Hamish Pirie’s close-worked production really pay off. The “training speak” that Menna requests her policeman friend (a low-key Roger Evans) not to use, her tired admonishments to the twins of “don’t start the Welsh”, are just as denuded as the wornly fabulous tales the pair spin. Their father was “borrowed from the sea”, while their grandfather was possibly a merman. This is all the while undercut by a vivid naturalism and firm humanity, with Anna Calder-Marshall immense as Iola blooming and disappearing into Alzheimer’s, and Anna Carteret note-perfect as her patient loving twin.

To win Guess Who in one move (spoiler alert) all you needed ask; “is your person black?” An answer in the affirmative could mean only poor pre-multiculture Anne. Salt, Root and Roe meditates on death and its becoming, and lightly constructs the strangeness of a disappearing monoculture. It is slippery and gauzy, it is the rural leakage within modernity. As Annet bemoans of her two boys “the only thing they learned about the sea was slavery”. Rural Wales has unique human geographic properties of ageing population, remote and isolated they carry their culture to the sea. This watery prism of a play allows a letting go, it is not a reclamation nor a lament, and in that way inflects with a note of stoic sadness the Dylan Thomas quip, “Wales: the land of my fathers. My fathers can have it.”

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Daniel B. Yates

Educated by the state, at LSE and Goldsmiths, Daniel co-founded Exeunt in late 2010. The Guardian has characterised his work as “breaking with critical tradition” while his writing on live culture &c has appeared in TimeOut London, i-D Magazine, Vice Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives and works in London E8, and is pleasant.

Salt, Root and Roe Show Info


Produced by Donmar Warehouse

Directed by Hamish Pirie

Written by Tim Price

Cast includes Anna Calder-Marshall, Anna Carteret, Roger Evans, Imogen Stubbs.

Link http://www.donmarwarehouse.com/pl135.html

Running Time 1hr 40mins

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