Royal Conservatoire of
Scotland, Glasgow
Four stars
“Looking in people’s
windows,” says the after-hours Cop in Will Eno’s 2010 play, “makes you feel
lonely.” This sense of loneliness slowly but surely permeates throughout Matthew
Lenton’s production, performed by final year BA Acting students from the RCS.
It’s there in the library, a seat of learning where McCallister Selva’s
new-in-town Mary forms a fly-by-night connection with Angus Taylor’s John
Dodge. It’s there too in the park, where Keiran Duncan’s Cop isn’t quite so
reflective when he encounters Calvin Noble’s Craig and Eimear Fearon’s Librarian
together on a park bench. And it’s there finally in the hospital, where
everyday matters of life and death co-exist in the same corridor. And all the
while behind the curtained windows of Julia Quante’s two-tiered set, people
live in the shadows as they imagine the worst of the world outside.
Lenton navigates his
cast of eleven through the play’s woozy twilight zone small town in limbo that
seems to be a neighbourhood somewhere between Milk Wood and Twin Peaks. There’s
a sense that everybody’s minding everybody else’s business, with the ensemble
gathering around the play’s central shared moments as if overseeing an asylum.
And when the entire company wave goodbye as the curtain slowly falls while the
plaintive piano patterns of Meirian Hall-Jones’ score sounds them out, the
audience too become complicit in the watching.
There are some lovely
performances here, with Selva and Taylor bringing an understated ennui to
Mary and John as their struggles to connect misfire. Noble lends a
poignancy to Craig as he forever listens in on things without ever truly being a
part of them. What emerges from the
mire of all these criss-crossing lives is a map, not just of life and death,
but of all the other accidents, emergencies and every other little thing
besides that gets forgotten as everybody stays safe in their own bubble.
Somehow, though, Eno suggests some kind of future, and hope for another beyond.
The Herald, November 1st 2019
Ends
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