Reviews OWE & Fringe Published 26 February 2013

Consumed

Tara Theatre ⋄ 20th - 23rd February 2013, and touring

Translations.

Alice Saville

A multimedia, bilingual experience, devised by its internationally based performers, Consumed is a deeply modish look at the business environment of modern Shanghai. Stylish and illuminating, its characters are trapped behind screens that echo those that frame the stage; language, cultural and emotional barriers that all but prevent them from really connecting.

John Bartholomew (Serge Soric) is an English businessman in Shanghai to conduct a business deal. He falls in love with his local counterpart Su Chen (Song Ru Hui) over dinner, with no translator in tow; their near-complete mutual incomprehension is alleviated by John’s business partner Tong Zheng (Ning Li), who relays John’s words to Su over instant messaging. The pace is slow and meditative, with most of the action piled into the final half-hour – long interludes of languid atmosphere conjure a shifting hotel room, conference centre, taxi cab world. Scenes are separated by bilingual announced headings, like chapters in a teach-yourself language tape, gently ironising the formulaic situations the characters find themselves in.

Producing a bilingual work is an exciting concept, but one that’s all but impossible to bring to non-bilingual audiences without getting tied up in subtitles, or prioritising one language over another. Here, Su’s words are only haltingly translated, late in the narrative. This device aligns the non-Chinese speaking portion of the audience squarely with her lover John, making us complicit with his pursuit, surrounding Su with mystery. The myth of smiling and quiet female exoticism is an old one, and strange to see in juxtaposition with a modern world of projection screens and instant messaging.

The piece’s multimedia approach is brilliant at evoking a specific climate, built from, not just suffused with, technology; Su and John’s night together is the meeting of two discrete tossings and turnings, separate hotel beds cross projected into a union that only happens through a camera lens. Relationships can only be understood through a computer or phone screen, with physicality held at a remove; free of urgency and force of movement, the aesthetic is cinematic. A kind of symmetry is provided by Dori Deng’s video work, a Cultural Revolution era student romance with all the allure of a forbidden Taiwanese love song; injecting Deng Li Jun’s story into a society where music was banned brings a layered poignancy to the narrative. Rich in technology, though, the present day narrative is comparatively light in content, in moments of cultural connection, rather than dissonance – leaving a sense of a sagging, dragging narrative, occasionally pulled sharp by striking images.

Su sends John poetry – through Tong’s attempts at translation, it fragments and breaks into multiple meanings, along the triple fracture lines of ambiguity in translated language, poetry and online messaging. Consumed‘s love story is so deeply immersed in multimedia that it would shrink to nothing if told without blackberries, projection and computers; stylishly told, its the atmosphere that lingers, more than its inhabitants, once the screens flicker out.

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Alice Saville

Alice is editor of Exeunt, as well as working as a freelance arts journalist for publications including Time Out, Fest and Auditorium magazine. Follow her on Twitter @Raddington_B

Consumed Show Info


Produced by Border Crossings

Directed by Michael Walling

Cast includes Ning Li, Song Ru Hui, Serge Soric

Link http://www.bordercrossings.org.uk/

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