Hotels, like airports, are anywhere spaces. The more ‘upmarket’ and expensive they are, the more they occupy a floating territory, more closely related to one another than their surroundings. The hotel room meanwhile is a repository for stories, a place of transience and passing through, with all trace of one occupant – literally – wiped away before the next arrives.
It’s this sensation, this placelessness, that Hotel Confessions, a double-bill of short plays staged by new site-responsive company The Building Site, taps into, if only in part. The plays are staged in Bermondsey Square Hotel, a great gleaming if slightly antiseptic box on the corner of a part-Georgian square in south London. For all its Mondrian-patterned stuffed dogs and splashy wall art, it still occupies a particular, familiar space: that of hotel.
Audience members assemble in the reception area (numbers are limited to ten per performance) and are advised to take a seat by a clerk in a slightly dated uniform. A man blows in, incongruously snow-shouldered on the hottest day of the year to date, and asks for a room for the night. There are none available, but there is an unoccupied bed in a twin-bedded room, which the man reluctantly consents to share. The set-up for the first piece thus established, the audience are escorted up in the lift to the hotel’s fifth floor, down a Shining-carpeted corridor to room 509.
The first play, The Night in the Hotel, is based on a short story by the German writer Siegfried Lenz. The curtains are drawn, the room dark and muggy; a man snores loudly from one of the beds. Once it gets going – it takes a while to find its feet – the dialogue between the two men is intriguing, but the piece still feels unsettled in the space and the sound effects are never entirely successfully integrated, only serving to call attention to themselves. The audience sit huddled at one end of the room and the performers awkwardly squeeze themselves into the remaining space: by placing the piece in a real hotel room it is, in some ways, diminished.
The second piece, and by far the more successful of the two, is Freya and Mr Mushroom, a new play by Nessah Aisha Muthy. A young girl invades the room of a salesman, who has something potentially world-changing concealed in his briefcase. This piece has a more satisfyingly unsettling quality, enhanced by Mark Carlisle’s enigmatic and slightly sinister turn as Mr Mushroom.
Anouke Brook’s direction doesn’t quite capitalise on the enforced intimacy of the hotel room; at times the space simply feels cramped rather than atmospheric. But while the first piece contains a lot of build-up and shuffling about in the dark, the second feels more wholly realised and there are some particularly nice touches: the hotel ‘staff’ switch uniforms between pieces, emphasising this sense of the hotel as a shifting space, not tied to a particular time and place, and a pig-tailed girl can be glimpsed lingering in corners and corridors.
The potential voyeurism of the hotel room could probably have been milked more fully (one thinks of Fiona Evans’ Scarborough, which takes place entirely in a seaside hotel but was performed in a recreated space at the Royal Court rather than in an actual hotel room); all those stories behind closed doors – the idea is certainly ripe with potential, but the space brings with it obstacles as well as inspiration and the company doesn’t quite manage to negotiate them; as an experience the piece has something to offer but the case is never quite made for swapping a stage set for the ‘real’ thing.
For tickets and further information, visit: Southwark Playhouse