You are asked to wear stout shoes and bring an uncooked potato. It is 10.30 at night. You don’t know when you get into the van (phones off) where you are going; you are asked not to speak to your fellow walkers. It’s a long time since I have been to a site-specific performance that was so truly absorbed in its geography – and so freewheeling in what it offers. So much about Alter prompted memories. Even Milton Keynes carries echoes of a long-ago culture; who, these days, would name a new town after a poet and a leftwing economist?
The Catalan company Kamchàtka have made a show that, unearthing suggestive histories, evokes political displacement and wild individual dreams, a blend of the personal and the far-reaching. At the end of a muddy, blackberry-hedged lane, spectators meet a young woman, her face unvarnished with anything but candour, carrying a suitcase like a second world war refugee. Handing out lanterns in glass jars, she leads us through a forest, towards an extraordinary eruption: a man, buried up to his waist in earth, is watching what looks like an old home movie. Our guide tries to dig him out of the ground; slowly, audience members begin to help. Yanked free, he joins the procession; we move on. We are led to an underground hoard of baked potatoes, and swap our uncooked items for delicious, salt-cooked ones. Jerky videos flicker on the lids of suitcases, on pieces of cloth, on bales of hay: snatches of forgotten lives; a couple dancing merrily; a house smashed into ruin by the catastrophe of earthquake or bombs.
In one glade, other lights gradually appear from all directions, as if the dazzle of stars had fallen into people’s hands. In another clearing, music breaks out. A lamenting drone becomes frisky, then wild. The audience is enticed, without hectoring, without words, to dance. As throughout Alter, there is no evident plot or purpose. Yet you are slowly immersed in another place, and emerge with an extra set of eyes.
Ten days ago, playwright David Byrne was announced as the new artistic director of the Royal Court, taking over from Vicky Featherstone in 2024. This is promising. As founding artistic director of the New Diorama, Byrne sprang surprises, not least with For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy and the ultra-vivacious Operation Mincemeat. One of his chief tasks will be to ensure that the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs continues as a place of vibrant exploration, which depends on the Royal Court developing its reputation not only as a place of new writers but of new directors. Milli Bhatia’s production of Jasmine Lee-Jones’s Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner (2019) was a whizzing case in point.
As, less explosively, is Nimmo Ismail’s direction of Rabiah Hussain’s Word-Play. Brief scenes are set up to demonstrate casually damaging, confining use of language. A loose-mouthed, messy-haired prime minister starts a row, not clearly defined but probably involving racism, by some florid ad-libbing. Hussain has worked in communications in central government, and the contortions of the press office ring true. A woman returning from visiting her parents abroad is accused of subjecting her infant daughter to radical influence: the evidence is negligible, the interrogation desperately painful. A dinner party spirals from joviality to acrimony when a couple disagree about the right amount of salt for a dish that belongs to the family tradition of one partner, but has been made by the other: culinary appropriation.
The dispersed targets are further scattered by episodes about language in general, perhaps shaded by Hussain’s experience of suffering a stroke and loss of speech while writing the play. There are sharp descriptions of the way words from a mother tongue may bubble up into the daily speech of an acquired second language. There are some flabby word-association passages, generalised disquisition on the gap between intention and delivery. The subject becomes so all-embracing that it smothers focus. Yet there are unforgettable moments.
One scene has actors (it’s a strong cast) sitting among the audience owlishly to discuss what it’s like watching a play at the Court Upstairs. Encased in Rosanna Vize’s wraparound design, the audience witness an exchange between a figure in a mirror and a figure on stage: a terrific image of dialogue that seems transparent yet takes place behind a barrier. Ismail extends the gift for emphasising the rhythm of speech that she showed in directing Sonali Bhattacharyya’s Two Billion Beats. No surprise that her mentor was the late, mighty Elyse Dodgson, who as international director of the Court helped to make the Theatre Upstairs marvellously outward-looking.
At the fine new gleaming Southwark Playhouse Elephant, the transfer of Sarah Meadows’s award-winning production of Ride has plenty of oomph. The real-life (though full of fabrications) history of Annie Londonderry, who in 1894 bicycled over the globe, reinventing herself as she did so, is given bravura blast by Liv Andrusier as the swaggering heroine. As her multitasking sidekick, Katy Ellis has a nimble comic touch. Amy Jane Cook’s set and costumes deftly switch from library to wild landscape, from swishing gowns to bloomers. But the dialogue and music by Freya Catrin Smith and Jack Williams are unremittingly gung ho until too late in the evening; lack of nuance makes Ride a declaration rather than an achievement.
Star ratings (out of five)
Alter ★★★★
Word-Play ★★★
Ride ★★
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