| Sparky Evening in Cardiff’s Newest Venue |
At Dirty Protest |
| Dirty Protest Meets Artes Mundi , Porter's Cardiff , January 16, 2013 |
Britain's pub population peaked at sixty-six thousand. The current winnowing will reduce it by a fifth. There is no consistency to the buildings with the boarded-over windows and the “For Sale” signs. They can be plain and functional, like the one in the shadow of Swansea's Grand Theatre, or jewels of architectural history like those in Gwyddelwern or Golden Grove. Cardiff's city centre has no shortage of drinking dens. Open a bar in November 2012, and it is either an act of caprice or has the stamp of entrepreneurial conviction. Five weeks in, hosting Dirty Protest's rainbow of seven short new plays, Porter's is looking like the second.Porter's is in a piece of lonely, left-over Victoriana in the middle of the building gigantism that was fuelled by pre-Lehman Brothers money. Its roof is concreted over for car parking; it sits by four lanes of through-route. As a theatre venue, it is enough to give the most confident of actors the shudders. No dimmed lighting, no space, no hideaway for an exit. The laughter from drinkers comes through from one side, the occasional squeal of a train braking from the other. It is raw, rough, even ridiculous. And it is brilliant. It has intimacy and character, for a company concentrating on word brought to life in acting. Dirty Protest has found a venue to match. “All art aspires to the condition of music” ran a highpoint of Victorian aestheticism. Now, it seems that all art aspires to the condition of performance. The genesis for these sparky ninety minutes has been an approach from the curators of Artes Mundi 5 to Dirty Protest to generate a theatrical response. Seven writers, seven ten-to-fifteen minute long pieces, range from monologue through dialogue to the involvement of all four actors. Catherine Paskell, at the directorial helm for the rapid rehearsal time, delivers an introduction of high spirit. The performance technically is script-in-hand, but in fact the actors have largely internalised their parts. As a response to the exhibits the work refers its audience to Artes Mundi 5. Theatre differs, in one respect, from the series of rooms at the National Museum. Visual display- the term “art” is not automatically applicable- has evolved in such a way that the curatorial explanation itself is obliged to play a crucial part. The prose that the works require are no longer small descriptions to the side, but ten foot square placards ripe with heavily latinate prose. Some of the displays demand them, because they communicate incompletely in their own right. The selectors are untroubled by the lack of some of the usual attributes for art. The descriptive prose in the Museum is heavy with big, significant words. One twenty-seven word lump of a sentence piles up eleven words, of three or more syllables, that denote an abstraction. The anonymous writers’ hold on aesthetics and metaphysics is unreliable, which makes all the more refreshing the unmediated experience at Porter’s of actors and writers. The seven pieces differ hugely. If they tend to the suggestive, the elliptical, it is skill enough to get exposition, atmosphere and conclusion within the time frame for each piece. They contain acts of sex and death in the tiny space; other human action, after that, is detail. One intriguing aspect is that the relationship of which piece connects to which Artes Mundi work is not given. It is a kind of puzzle that hovers, but does not matter overly. The heritage of caste looks connected to Andy Evans’ “We are chimera.” Sara Lloyd-Gregory and Hannah Daniel are a duo caught up in a nightmare future Britain of a dystopian ethnic apartheid. But then “My Heartland” also looks indebted to the installation of Sheela Gowda. Television documentaries on the topic have stated that Britain is home to a million compulsive hoarders. Tom Wentworth’s character Steve is one such, with his hundred and fifty packs of custard power and boxes of unused videotapes in their virgin cellophane. In “Heart of Glass” Katherine Chandler catches the truth of the gaps and silences that both connect and separate us. Hannah Daniel and Sion Ifan swing between fire and distance. In Heledd Wyn’s “Too Cool for School” Daniel Llewellyn-Williams’ Alwyn Dickhead fires off an impressive array of contrasting teenage accents. And the message from Dirty Protest Meets Artes Mundi? Theatre deals fitfully with the part that women play in 2013 Britain, but that’s not theatre in particular, nor Wales, it’s the culture per se. It is small wonder that BBC4 nine o’clock on a Saturday gets the audience, which it does. As for the second- Dirty Protest lives on the gust of enthusiasm and the conviction that this genre of rough crucible for word and performance matters. Catherine Paskell asks for a show of hands, those who are new to Dirty Protest and those who are returning. The second number is good, evidence that the company has won itself a following. |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
This review has been read 1795 times There are 16 other reviews of productions with this title in our database:
|
