You
hardly ever go to see a show by Sound & Fury. Not to
see one. With the notable exception
of 2009’s
Kursk, the company
usually presents work in near-total or utter darkness. Even getting the
audience settled into the preparatorily dim Clare studio of the Young
Vic on press night was an event; at least one punter was directed to a
seat which wasn’t there. Then complete blackness fell, and the sound of
a thunderstorm…
When I say that this is a portrayal of a man (an astronomer, who gives
public presentations in a planetarium) going gradually blind, you may
assume that the light in the theatre fades along with his vision, but
the piece – created by Sound & Fury’s Mark and Tom Espiner and Dan
Jones together with co-writer Hattie Naylor – is much cannier than
that. The company has long worked on the basis that deprivation of one
sense sharpens the others, and so it proves here: we find our
partly-lit glimpses of performer John Mackay as astronomer Max, of
projections of the night sky and so forth, all the more precious and
also more significant because they are in such short supply. Jones’
sound design provides everything from Max’s six-year-old son running
around the place playing with
Thunderbirds
action figures to a rain shower in which drops fall with identifiably
different sounds on various parts of a garden, by way of a scene in
which Max blindfolds himself to practise preparing his son’s packed
lunch sightlessly, to the accompaniment of Booker T and the MGs’ “Green
Onions”.
The segments of astronomy and cosmology set up a parallel between the
largest scale imaginable and the smallest personal level, the
one-to-one of the father/son interaction. The phenomenal distances we
can see in the night sky both contrast and correspond with the
shrinking personal world afforded by Max’s retinitis pigmentosa. Dick
Straker’s projection designs encompass the entire Milky Way on the
Clare’s ceiling, and photographs imposed on to otherwise blank pieces
of paper. The programme includes a bibliography of works by the likes
of Hawking, Sagan, Koestler and in particular neuropsychologist Richard
Gregory. As so often with Sound & Fury, you leave the theatre’s
eloquent darkness with a twinge of reluctance about re-entering the
seeing world.
Written for the Financial
Times.