| Physical metallic poetry |
Crash |
| Aberystwyth University’s Dept of Film, Theatre and TV Studies , Castle Theatre, Aberystwyth , December 15, 2001 |
| David Rabey’s Crash at Theatr Y Catsell is an extraordinary achievement. Nine relatively inexperienced actors – students of his – tackle a script (his script) which is a kind of physical metallic poetry laden with a graphic sexual language. The play is based on the Ballard novel, of course, which was recently filmed by David Cronenberg so it was interesting to compare this theatre piece with the film. Mamet has said that film tells its story through pictures while theatre tells it story through words and wondering how Rabey would deal with the business of crashing I should not have been surprised to discover that he would instinctively echo Mamet’s assessment. The play tells its story in a series of narratives that derive from, it seemed to me, a car accident involving the actress Liz Hurley! I occasionally lost the thread of it perhaps because it comes at you with such force and speed. But also I thought it may have been because of Rabey’s convention of having each actor play each character in turn scene by scene. In fact, this didn’t seem to matter just as it didn’t matter that we weren’t afforded the becoming familiar with a particular actor to help us engage with the character. It is to show us something mechanical, deadly, twenty first century, frightening, dehumanising and decharacterising that is so much a part of Rabey’s intention. There are no props except for a chair of steel and rubber (body and tyre) and apart from one explosive moment when an oil drum sweeps across the clerestory of the theatre to crash into an oil drum anchored on the other side of the space, all the crashing is conveyed in the movement of the actors. When you consider that none have had any serious training in movement (I was told), the ambition of the decision to play it like this is stunningly audacious and yet they pull it off. To say that David Rabey’s work is always unexpected is not quite true because we expect the unexpectedness! But it is always intensely theatrical and invariably surprising and often stunning which is what keeps you involved and makes the two and a half hours in this case seem like considerably less. And I am always amazed at what he is able to get out of his novice casts. To return to the film/theatre dichotomy. This is theatre. It may sound trite to say that when one of the actors pukes up a mouthful of water over a member of the audience (his reaction for me was part of the performance!) you know you are not in a cinema but there is something so utterly physical and undetachable about the experience of having the arguments in your face, of having actors simulate an act of buggery three feet from you that speaks to a deeper engagement. That deeper engagement is a moral one. In a cinema, the audience’s experience is essentially a passive one. What the audience sees on the screen and how they see it has already been decided by the director. There is nothing creative about the experience and hence nothing moral. David Rabey is a subtle director. By which I mean that he doesn’t use the event of his play to show off his talents but instead uses it to get the actors to reveal the arguments. If there is a space between the audience and the action in a play – and here there is not much! – it’s one that’s fraught with the arguments of the piece and we are engaged creatively and morally with those arguments. In cinema, the space between the audience and the screen, apart from the dust particles caught in the projector’s light, is empty. I’ve seen the film and while I was impressed with the cinematic virtues of it I found it unengaging and even patronising while Rabey’s play was the reverse of this. Sitting in the theatre with the very effective chrome walls and chrome floor of Victoria Kippax’s design was like sitting in huge garage and the actors Harriet Coffey, Stephen Cromwell, Kate Freeman, Isobel Jones, Emma Proudlock, Fred Sandy, Nathan Sarchet-Waller, Sian Saunders and Phil Waterhouse were mechanics. I applaud the Mechanics! Eric Schneider’s excellently utilised brilliantly minimalistic music does not intrude (I hate music in theatre which seeks to elicit emotional responses which compromise the intellectual): instead, it evokes with its steely precision the hard consonant sounds of that words intellect and curiously reinforces the fact that this is an intensely political piece: we are engaged in arguments about social values. Theatre is like poetry. It distils the arguments and imagery of the “real” world that most people miss into a new reality. It creates new worlds. A new ontology. Rabey’s ontology is of a world in which the metaphysics, the preoccupations of our intellect and language are increasingly determined by our imprisonment in a bubble going nowhere in a river of steel. |
Reviewed by: Dic Edwards |
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