The Devil Speaks True at Vaults 2016.
1. The Macbeth that recently played at the Young Vic, directed by Carrie Cracknell and choreographer Lucy Guerin, got middling to mediocre reviews, so when I saw it towards the end of the run (for work) I had low expectations. It so surpassed the reviews. There was one bit in particular that was lean-forward-in-seat brilliant: as Macbeth approaches his final battle, Banquo returns to the stage, delivering several speeches describing Birnam Wood’s movement towards Dunsinane through a microphone while slumped stage left – in the same position each of the Macbeths has previously slumped, when struggling to assimilate the emotional upheaval of Duncan’s murder. It was as though we were seeing Macbeth through Banquo’s eyes: the man who had stolen a kingship from the perspective of his victim, whose children would be kings. There was such subtlety to Prasanna Puwanarajah’s performance throughout, in the sidelong glances he would throw at Macbeth as his suspicions of his friend and battle-mate rose, in the low-voltage jitter of his response to the witches, and in this battle scene he excelled, speaking in a metallic lifeless tone, reporting without curiosity but also without judgement.
2. Give Me Your Love, the second part of Ridiculusmus’ trilogy thinking about mental health, got a mixture of reviews when it was performed at Battersea Arts Centre, including a couple of nonplussed ones from the old guard. (“I learned little about the big issues,” complained Michael Billington, confusing the venue for a lecture theatre once again.) As Zach, David Woods spent almost the entire hour cramped inside a cardboard box, scuttling like a crab in his bare and filthy room; a former soldier living with post-traumatic stress disorder since returning from the Iraq war, he chooses this entrapment as a means to feel safe. In a startling scene shift, the lights begin to flash and electronic music smashes into the space, and Jon Haynes – who to this point had been hidden away in a side-room, projecting the voice of Zach’s impatient wife Carol – judders across the stage wearing only his underpants. It’s comical but also has a violence that keys into Zach’s war experience: it’s as though, in this dance scene, we’re seeing embodied the electric currents of Zach’s brain, the synapses crackling from warped connections. Zach’s story is told more through intimation than exposition, his experience apprehended more than understood, and that feels right: war has separated him from others, even his wife. And yet, in the most beautiful line of the script, there is a recognition that mental health problems are a shared condition: in a pique of frustration with his his friend Ieuan – a scratchier performance from Haynes – Zach shouts at him, through the box and the door, to get out of his own box. What box? “Whatever box you’re in!” In that moment, post-traumatic stress becomes just one expression among many of the stress and damage experienced by the brain, living in this world in which we live.
3. On the first night of Forest Fringe’s two-week residency at the Gate in 2013, Neil Callaghan presented a short dance solo called A Certain Shaft of Light. Hanging from the ceiling – is that right? – was a tiny bulb; Callaghan stood below it and told a story of sailors, who lived so long ago his tale had the quality of myth, navigating their ships by following the North Star. Polaris. He told this story and then he pointed to the light and began to spin. His body whirled with such speed and precision it seemed itself to generate light; and with each spin he kept pointing at that bulb, and the movement was so mysterious that in my memory all is blurred and rather than sitting in the black box of a theatre he transported us to the midnight sky above an inky sea, glittering with a full moon and the assembled constellations. And then the blur began to clear and his body began to slow and I realised I was breathless. I’ve sought his work out where I can ever since.
4. I haven’t seen The Encounter but I’ve had a good run with binaural work, and work that takes place in the dark. The first time I saw David Rosenberg/Glenn Neath’s Ring, I felt seasick at the end: wobbly legged and unmoored. By the fourth time, I welcomed that darkness for its velvet sensuality, giggled at the whisper of voices in my ears. And then there was Kiln’s A Voyage Round My Skull: the story for that wasn’t so effective (doctor, patient, thwarted love) but the binaural stuff was staggering. When I put on my earphones it was as though drills really were grinding towards my brain.
5. I’m avoiding writing about The Devil Speaks True. I’m avoiding writing about it because it’s one of the most frustrating things I’ve seen in ages. Annoying, even. I’m avoiding it because Lyn Gardner didn’t get on with it either, and I don’t see what another negative review brings to the conversation. I’m avoiding it because the words in my head while watching it were lazy words that I don’t want to use, and rather than dismiss it as gimmicky I ought to take the time really to think about why director Joel Scott used binaural and staged it in intermittent darkness, when neither achieved the disorienting effects I’ve experienced elsewhere. I’m avoiding it because I don’t want to be prescriptive, or tell Scott what he should have done (there’s a touch of that at the end of Lyn’s review), when the entire premise of the work strikes me as flawed.
It’s fine to try and see Macbeth through Banquo’s eyes – Cracknell managed something along those lines – but Scott attempts to do so by interspersing extracts from Shakespeare with recordings of soldiers talking about their experiences of PTSD, which creates the feeling of listening to two scripts smashed together. (Perhaps I’m also avoiding writing about Devil because my beloved friend Samantha Ellis was its dramaturg. But she didn’t attend rehearsals, and scripts function differently on paper to how they do on the stage.) The interviews with the soldiers are interesting and absorbing: one in particular describes PTSD as “a normal response to an abnormal situation”, striking a similar note to that sounded in Give Me Your Love. I got far more out of them than I did out of the readings of Macbeth, which just reminded me of being at school, dragging myself through texts in an arcane language that I struggled to appreciate. The friend who came with me hadn’t seen Macbeth since she was at school, and found the video clips of a young man in woodland befuddling: she appreciated the finer reading, that these images could have represented Banquo as a young soldier, but didn’t catch that this might also be his son Fleance, fleeing the scene of his father’s murder.
Callaghan, who choreographs and performs as Banquo, is typically restrained and careful in his movements, every flinch of his face and body inflected with the trauma of his experiences in battle. But it’s too much to make him the glue binding the disparate elements of this production together, and it never seemed to me that we really were re-seeing Macbeth from his perspective, only listening to the same old words delivered in a more fashionable way.
The Devil Speaks True is on until 27th February 2016 at Vaults. Click here for tickets.