Robert Cromarty on the “wine-dark sea” of Student Theatre…
full-blooded | immense theatricality | subtelty sacrificed?


Full-blooded
Offensive Shadows Theatre Company’s production of Odyssey is perhaps the most difficult show I have had to review, not because the subject matter was overly confusing nor any such other reason to do with the contents of the piece. No, the difficulty arises because I must make a fundamental decision: whether to treat the production as one of a piece of student writing or as one of a full-blooded established play. Either approach would affect the overall result with a great degree of bias, so I have decided to cheat and attempt to treat it as both. Also it necessitates discussion of not only the production but also of the script itself, a feature that usually may be dismissed as being simply successful or not successful.

Let me begin by saying that on the whole I was genuinely impressed with what I saw, and with what I later heard in discussion with Mark Quartley, the author of the piece. If treated as a piece of student writing it was most certainly the strongest effort I have yet seen in my time at Durham, and not only as it managed to sustain itself for most of its two hour plus run. The brief synopsis of the piece would be a tale of two (or is it just one?) brothers, Neoptolemus and Pyrrhus, and their general coping with late teenage/early adolescence life and their personal traumas, primarily the death of their mother, during that period of their lives. While this may not be a particularly original idea, it was nevertheless, for the most part, well-handled by Quartley.

The style of the writing at the opening of the play proper struck me immediately as being reminiscent of Pinter, with meandering sentences seemingly without real import serving to establish to the audience the long-standing, intimate relationship between the two brothers. For example, the initial lines of Odyssey revolve around possession of a mango and the necessity of getting “Five-a-Day” of fruit, which nicely echoed and paid homage to the “Where are the scissors?” conversation that opens Pinter’s The Homecoming – a play which Quartley admits is one of his favourites. The other significant element in the script is the level of allusion and reference to Greek mythology, predominantly Homer. Beyond the names of the protagonists, there is also the fact that their house is constructed around a defunct electricity pylon in a transparent allusion to the bed of Odysseus which was constructed around an olive tree. But where Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, preserved the sanctity of her marriage bed in the face of the attentions of dozens of suitors, the beds in the house of Pyrrhus and Neoptolemus are the scene for adultery and relationship breakdown.

At times, however, the attempts to echo the Epic tradition seemed contrived and a little flat. In particular the invocation of the Muse, the initial lines of the piece and an echo of the formal opening style of Homer’s Iliad, Odyssey, and other Greek Epics (“Sing Muse etc…”), seemed incongruous to what followed and lacked the subtlety which the author displayed elsewhere, although it would return in some moments that followed. However, the perversion of the role of the Muse, danced powerfully by Lily Howkins, in the play itself – from artistically inspirational to willfully destructive – was interesting and effective.

Immense theatricality
To turn to aspects of the production: the first point is that it did have an immense sense of theatricality and the use of the stage space, a feature that has been missing from a number of recent Durham productions. The centre-piece of the staging was a set of zip-up scaffolding, the pylon-entwined house, which served as a focal point for the entire production, doubling as club, wasteland, and other locations through the very clever use of castors, to make the entire construction revolve, and sets of curtains and blinds. The structure was evocative of the set of Metamorphosis, where scaffolding served as the room and cage for Gregor Samsa as he changed into an insect. Here, in the decoration at least, was evidently some of the input of the director Simon Eves, as it was redolent of his production of A Dream Play. In truth it is difficult to establish how much artistic input the director had in this show, simply because of the fact it is not an established play, but one would like to think that it extended simply beyond set-dressing, despite the comment in his director’s note that he is “still not sure what Odyssey is saying.” The scheme of the decoration was based around hazard tape, black and yellow dominating the space, warning the audience that violence, crime, and death are to follow. This was also nicely picked up in the costume of Clara, played by Naomi Cranstoun, the psychology student who attempts to help the brothers, ensuring the transmission that what she says and does constitutes a warning, but also ultimately marks her out as another of the victims of the brothers’ activities.

One of the aspects of the production that I did not really enjoy was the too-frequent lapses into urban street-dancing that seemed to interrupt the scenes. Whilst I believe that this was intended to transmit a sensation of the grittiness and rawness of the piece, they really were not necessary. As a result of this they simply served to highlight their secondary purpose, that of altering the position of several boxes on the stage apron. The only occasions on which these dances were significant were when the Muse physically manipulated Mark Quartley’s Pyrrhus, but this again could have been done in a subtler manner.

In terms of the performance the acting was generally good. It was interesting to see Cranstoun return to the Durham stage (she graduated in June 2006), but at times her performance did not reach the level I had seen from her in other productions. While she played the nervous student aspects of the part very well, offering tea and then discovering she had none for example, the moments when she revealed her own angst-ridden past were less successful. This could have been the result of the script, as the lines were significantly stronger for the two male parts than for the two females. Jessica Clarke, who played Cris – the love interest and, ultimately, sexual predator of the two brothers – also seemed a little one-dimensional, but certainly had no qualms in her performance of a character whose youthful appearance belies her ‘Black Widow’ qualities. Cris is the final element that guarantees the implosion of the brother’s relationship, and at times the character felt a little too much like a theatrical device than a character in her own right.

The best performance was that of Jonny Scott as Neoptolemus, who conveyed the average ‘man on the street’ in an impressive way. Normality is one of the most difficult qualities to convey in theatre as it essentially everyday and has the potential to be dangerously uninteresting, but Scott’s performance carried it off with an affability that should be commended. His treatment of the character after the unseen event that leaves Neoptolemus somewhat mentally handicappe
d was pathetic in the classical sense of the word; again it was strong for its refusal to descend into a parody of the condition and produced a very moving portrayal. Scott worked well with Quartley, which is unsurprising given the number of times they have performed together. This was especially successful in the rapid exchanges at the beginning of the play where the differences between the intellectually aspirational Pyrrhus, who wants to go to Cambridge, and his more visceral brother become apparent; for example, while Pyrrhus steals books, Neoptolemus steals DVDs. They are also different in the manner in which they ‘cope’ with trauma of their mother’s death: Neoptolemos seems to have moved on, but in actuality he copes with the escapism afforded him by alcohol, drugs, and his relationship with Cris; Pyrrhus copes by self-harm and cod philosophy. It is this dichotomy that makes them seem more like aspects of one person at times, rather than two individuals – a duality mirrored by the mythological associations of their names.

Subtlety sacrificed?
Of course, there were aspects of this play and production that were not so successful. In addition to those mentioned above, one of the failings was that at times the subtlety of the writing was sacrificed to ensure the audience ‘got’ what was going on. The most striking example, without doubt, was the quotation of the entirety of D.H. Laurence’s “The Piano” – a poem that screams of nostalgia. Finding the correct level to pitch to the audience is a key concept of play writing and, while Quartley was largely successful, this created a lengthy hiatus in the middle of the performance. Similarly, at times the concerns of the piece – depression, honesty, deception, love – seemed to be competing with each other rather than complementing each other, as if Quartley, in trying to say a great deal, ended up struggling to find his point. Likewise, while I enjoyed the fluidity of time in the play it seemed very heavily weighted towards the first half (it was written in four acts), and this had the effect that what occurred after the interval, while it did not short-change what went before, seemed to unravel rather too rapidly for my liking, lurching from one event to the next. This resulted in a rather predictable outcome – the accusation from Cris, who has transferred her ‘love’ from Neoptolemus to Pyrrhus, that the now handicapped Neoptolemus has raped her, which causes Pyrrhus to attempt to castrate his brother and shortly precedes his own suicide.

However, I was generally impressed with what I saw, and it revealed that ‘student writing’ can achieve a level of subtlety and craft that shows encouragement for the future of Quartley’s writing. With the revisions he intends to include before attempting to take the piece on tour I feel that he will have a successful show to work with.