Reviews
Alyce von Rothkirch considers three new playtexts.
Football
Lewis Davies
Parthian
£6.99 Paperback
ISBN 1902638530
Seeing without Light
Simon Turley
Parthian
£7.99 Paperback
ISBN 1902638638
Still Life
Charles Way
Parthian
£7.99 Paperback
ISBN 1902638662
The plot of Lewis Davies’s short comedy Football is quite ingeniously summarised in its initial stage directions:
It’s 2006. England have won the world cup. (Thank f*** – otherwise we’d have to invade Iraq again.) Sir David Beckham is a national hero. His shirt has sold for 137,000 euros at a charity auction. Three friends meet for dinner; two want sex, the other bought the shirt. It is almost ART.
Indeed, it is almost Art, Yasmina Reza’s successful comedy. Three friends meet after one of them has bought a ludicrously expensive object (there an abstract painting, here Beckham’s football shirt with ‘authentic’ grass stains) and end up discussing the nature of presentation and representation. And, in this play, authenticity. Is David Beckham’s shirt real or fake? (It is swapped with a similar shirt several times in the play, so that nobody can be quite sure which the original shirt is any more.) Is Jason, who is a successful TV chef, a real or a fake cook? Is Clive, who has failed both in his career and in his ambitions to write a book about football, a failure, or is he the only person who can still see what’s real? Is Kate, who’s a successful sports editor even though she doesn’t care about sports, a real or a fake journalist? And what about their friendship – real or fake? Interestingly, the structure of the plot is conspicuously anti-realist. Similar to the many recent plays in which the characters tell their story rather than simply and unselfconsciously ‘being in it’ – a recent Welsh example is Gary Owen’s Crazy Gary’s Mobile Disco – the characters take it in turns to narrate what is happening. The characters thus influence the story by telling it, which again raises the question of whether or not what is being told is the truth. Ultimately, though, the question of authenticity doesn’t seem to matter that much – what matters is the truth that lies in the telling of the story.
Both Simon Turley’s Seeing without Light and Charles Way’s Still Life have been commissioned for Plymouth’s Theatre of Science initiative. In this project, theatre practitioners worked together with scientists to create a drama programme for local schools and for a community outreach programme. The plays were to address biomedical issues, ethics and to establish a dialogue between theatre and science. Both plays achieve those aims by incorporating the dialogue between art and science in the plot itself: in Seeing without Light the two central characters are the scientist, Rachel, who is engaged in research on immunisation against HIV, and the artist, Paul. The play charts the breakdown of their relationship, which is mainly due to their inability to communicate: neither has much understanding of what the other does. Central to the play are also the linked notions of exploitation and responsibility. The work of both scientist and artist depends to some extent on exploiting others: Kate needs volunteers for her research – the Kenyan woman, Hawa, who, although she is forced to work as a prostitute and loses her son to AIDS, seems to be immune herself, and Dan, who also seems immune after having been in a relationship with a man who recently died of AIDS and with whom he had regular unprotected sex. Neither Hawa nor Dan has any real choice as to whether to help or not – Hawa desperately needs the money Kate offers, and Dan allows himself to be convinced that helping Kate will serve the memory of his dead partner and help him to deal with his own grief. Dan also works as an assistant for Paul, who seems to be going through a phase of creative stasis: Paul exploits Dan’s ideas and, crucially, both Paul and Dan steal some of Kate’s work to incorporate in an installation. Thus the play raises crucial questions: is progress in science or in art more important than the individual people concerned? Are Dan’s early doubts about taking part in the research project merely selfish – throwing a spanner in the works of progress which might ultimately save the human race from a dreadful disease? Or does the unquestioned belief in progress ride roughshod over individuals’ rights?
The same question is put strikingly in Charles Way’s Still Life. The play is set in an immensely evocative space: the fourth wall has finally been removed and the audience becomes an intimate part of the action as the whole theatre space, including the auditorium, becomes the house in which the action takes place. Thus, the audience comes to share the fate of the two central characters, Charles, a seemingly middle-aged artist, and Simon, a young reporter. Simon has come to the house to interview Charles about his work. In a very short time it becomes clear that he won’t be able to leave again – that, like Charles, he’s imprisoned in the house because of a genetic fluke which lets both men age only very slowly. The house turns out to be a cross between the cage in which laboratory rodents are kept and the Big Brother house: the inhabitants can do everything they please while mysterious experiments are being conducted by unseen scientists – everything except leave. The play charts Simon’s progress from blind anger and despair to a kind of acceptance – and this is the moment at which Charles is finally allowed to depart. The play’s ending indicates that the cycle may continue.
Unsurprisingly, both plays leave us with more questions than answers. In Seeing without Light, the relationship between art and science breaks down. And even though both Kate and Paul have some success – the results of the AIDS research remain inconclusive, but Kate receives funding to conduct research in another area, and Paul is able to sell his multimedia installation – the play hints that these victories might be Pyrrhic. Still Life very clearly
questions the way in which ‘science’ can exploit individuals for a purpose that remains unclear.
What is slightly disappointing about both plays is that the audience
may leave the theatre without having gained much more insight into the aspects of science the plays describe. To be fair, Seeing without Light tries to be even-handed by allowing the voice of science as much room as the voice of art. However, the audience does not get a great sense of the intricacies of the science involved. Still Life raises important questions, but makes no attempt to explain the point of the research project conducted or what its possible benefits might be. Nevertheless, both plays are interesting contributions to the recent upsurge of plays on science.
Page(s) 88-90
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