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Showing posts with label vault festival. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vault festival. Show all posts
Friday, February 22, 2019
Friday, February 22, 2019
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Are you scared of the dark? Claustrophobic? Prone to fits of terror?
These are the questions posed as you enter Darkfield's twin 20 minute shows Séance and Flight. Both of them take place in pitch darkness, both take place in shipping containers and both are sonic performances using binaural recordings to tell their story.
I've long had a soft spot for theatre that plunges the audience into darkness. The best I've seen was Lulu Raczka's A Girl In School Uniform (Walks Into A Bar), which incorporated disorientating blackouts into its post-apocalyptic plot, but I've enjoyed several shows (many of which have used the subterranean tunnels of Leake Street) which use the technique.
Darkness is a powerful way to heighten the audience's senses and give their imaginations a nudge. Deprived of visual stimulation, the brain fills in the gaps and whatever you conjure up in your mind's eye is guaranteed to be more terrifying and impressive than whatever a small-scale theatre company with limited means can put on stage.
Without giving too much of the game away, Séance sits its audience around a long table, gives them a pair of headphones and instructs that no matter what happens, they must keep their hands on the table at all times or spooky and bad things will happen. As the lights go out, the supernatural plays its hand as an ominous soundscape plays out and a strange man whispers mysterious things in our ears.
Flight opens with a deeply impressive set that perfectly recreates the interior of a jet. In fact, I think it actually is the interior of the jet. This experience takes you on a very strange trip in which the fabric of reality is first torn, then eventually breaks apart completely. The headphone track is combined with some alarming bass rumbling to simulate turbulence, and you viscerally sense the plane's engines being pushed to their limit. If you're scared of flying I'd maybe give it a miss.
If you're torn between the two shows, my recommendation is to go for Flight. Séance wasn't bad, but it's a surface-level exploration of the occult and, if you've seen any kind of seance in any other media, you can quickly figure out where this one's going. The binaural recordings in both shows successfully create the illusion of a three-dimensional soundscape around you in both shows, but in Séance things get a little wobbly as you know that the soundscape cannot physically fit within the performance space.
It works much more successfully in Flight, partly because the audience is familiar with the bing-bong announcement sounds and rattling equipment of aeroplanes. When someone whispers in your ear in Flight, it's all too easy to imagine them leaning over the back of the seat to quiz you. Plus, the simple tactile feel of the leather seat and the moulded plastic walls go a hell of a long way to making you feel very, very far from a tunnel in central London. (They also do something very cool with a curtain that I won't spoil).
Having said all that and despite being very impressed by the binaural technical stuff, neither Séance nor Flight genuinely engaged me. They are both very interesting experiences and I have no regrets about attending, but I didn't have much of an emotional response them other than enjoying sinking back into the inky, relaxing gloom.
Séance (tickets here) runs until 17 March and Flight (tickets here) runs until 27 February. Both are at VAULT Festival.
Friday, February 17, 2017
Friday, February 17, 2017
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The disembodied voice can be a hugely effective theatrical device. Booming from speakers and reverberating around the walls, it leaves you feeling disorientated and paranoid. We can't help but play detective, trying to deduce things about the voice's owner, assembling a mental picture of what we expect to see.
Nathan Lucky-Wood's A Haunting exploits this to the fullest. This is a contemporary drama (equal parts horror and pitch-black comedy) that shows that boundaries between our anonymous online lives and our flesh n' blood interactions aren't quite as set in stone as you might imagine.
The centre of the story is awkward teenager Mark (Roly Botha). He's a pretty typical 15 year old - perpetually illuminated by the pale light of a laptop screen, spending his nights blowing away terrorists in Counter-Strike, watching gross-out videos and gently exploring his sexuality. He casually wonders whether he might be gay, but doesn't seem particularly bothered one way or the other, just impatient to know for sure.
Giving him an education is a reedy, nasal and manipulative voice. This stranger (Jake Curran) grooms Mark, peppering him with compliments designed to isolate him from his peers ("you're so much more mature than those kids" etc). The two even engage in some bizarre Skype audio roleplay, in which Mark asks the stranger if they could pretend they're naughty lesbian schoolgirls undressing one another.
Notably absent is Mark's mother Anna (Izabella Urbanowicz), an advertising executive whose parenting style seems to consist of parking her son in front of the internet and spending her evenings socialising with friends. It's not that she's a bad person (or even a bad mother) but, perhaps fatefully, for the moment she has decided to prioritise herself.
What follows is a tense and scary narrative with flashes of mordant humour. We learn more about the mysterious stranger, more about the storied past of Marks' Mum and a lot of long-buried drama bubbles to the surface.
It makes for a damn fine play - eschewing complex stagecraft in favour confident writing and performances. Lucky-Wood is particularly excellent at subtly shifting the balance of power in a conversation, particularly in the scenes in which both Mark and the online stranger gently jockey for dominance in the conversation. It's fascinating how Mark refuses to become a victim in all this - like any teenager he's after a degree of autonomy - and if it involves doing sexual favours for creepy weirdoes at least it's his decision to do so.
There's also a brilliant cranking up of tension right up until the final minutes, the play gradually doling out revelations that kept me on the edge of my seat (though given the butt-numbing wooden benches in the Vault this isn't too difficult). It's a little sad how refreshing it was for me to see genuinely smart writing that doesn't resort to gimmickry or pretension - just a skilful and efficient storytelling.
It's helped by a strong cast. I always enjoy Jake Curran in whatever he's in - I always like a actor that sweats a bit, plus few people convey wirily twisted intelligence better than he does. Much of the show turns on his vocal performance, which is carefully pitched between ominous and friendly, wheedling away with skin-crawling obsequiousness. Also excellent is Izabella Urbanowicz, who gives whatever she's in some serious welly. Anna isn't the most demented role I've seen Urbanowicz play, but she approaches her with an effectively steely resolve. Roly Botha, who I've not seen before, also impresses - summing up much of his performance with an evocative curl of his lip.
It's probably the best thing I've seen at Vault Festival thus far and an easy recommendation. Go check it out!
A Haunting is at Vault Festival until 19 February. Tickets here.
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