We live in an age of surfaces, where being telegenic may be more help to an ambitious politician than far-sighted policies. Scored for four voices that shift between driven, prose-poetic monologues and treacherous conversation, Gary Owen's new play, The Drowned World, offers an intriguing apocalyptic vision of a society that's even more obsessed with the skin-deep and is like an extreme photographic negative of our own. Here, in a surveillance state where people are classified as "citizens" and "non-citizens", it's the ugly who are in control and the beautiful who are on the run from brutal policies involving quarantine round-ups and rendering factories.
Vicky Featherstone directs this Paines Plough production with a strong feel for the stylised abstract geometry of a piece in which a good-looking young couple (Josephine Butler and Theo Fraser Steele) are forced into risky hiding with Darren, a reclusive, unlovely citizen (Neil McKinven) who nurses a diseased fixation for his female guest.
The contradictory forces of hatred for the Other and the desire to possess it are exposed, in all their self-defeating and self-despising meanness, through a story that sees Darren bartering away the girl's beauty (her hair, her gold-filled teeth) to a fetishistically covetous, blackmailing quarantine officer (Eileen Walsh).
Developed with Graeae, Britain's leading theatre company for people with physical impairments, The Drowned World reverses the conventional pattern of prejudice in a vivid and valuably resensitising exercise in defamiliarisation |
