I AM FALLING
Gate Theatre, London W11
Opened 9 January, 2008
***
One of the hot topics in British theatre
at the moment is text versus event. Despite Arts Council assurances,
many practitioners believe that funding is being reallocated towards
trendy circus-skills ventures and the like; conversely, accusations fly
that some critics are reactionary in exalting the playwright when the
essence of a theatre experience is its liveness. Carrie Cracknell’s
“dance theatre collaboration”, which closes her and Natalie Abrahami’s
first season as artistic directors at the Gate, illustrates both sides
of the argument.
In conception, the 40-minute piece is an astute balance of words and
dance. A middle-aged man (Simon Molloy) narrates into a microphone an
account of the party which he did not know was his parents’ farewell to
the world, and his subsequent discovery of their joint suicide: they
preferred to go together rather than be separated by the mother’s
cancer. He describes a photograph from his childhood of the family on a
clifftop; meanwhile, two younger performers enact some of the events
recounted, but principally manifest the motifs. Foremost of these is
intimacy, in various forms. Ben Duke and Petra Soor’s pas de deux show their bodies
meshing efficiently together; this is intimacy as a fact rather than an
emotional significance, and when they repeatedly save each other from
falling, the sense is not of trust or relief but simple assurance in
one another. The structure of the company – two young dancers, one
older actor – also illustrates that the parents’ closeness
unintentionally excludes their son. The movement speaks to us as the
words do not.
But only to some extent. There is a sense that this is a small piece
because the hybrid form might not bear that much more; it is a snapshot
or a short story rather than a feature film or a full drama. Moreover,
the design (which permeates the entire venue, foyer and all) is filmic:
Katharine Williams’ lighting flickers and strobes suggestively, and
Garance Marneur shows us the stage framed in cinema-screen proportions,
having otherwise literally reconstructed the fourth wall. I’ve wondered
before what stage designers think this does for a live experience; in a
small and, yes, intimate space like the Gate, and for a piece intended
to demonstrate the directness of non-verbal communication, it is even
more mystifyingly contradictory.