Reviews
of The Message
Evening
Standard, 6 March 1997
The Message, The Lyric Hammersmith
The
message is: they're back
Swansea-based Volcano Theatre made their name by being more violent
but also more narratively focused than other physical theatre companies
of the late Eighties. They kicked and punched merry hell out of each
other and out of texts by Berkoff, Shakespeare and the poet Tony Harrison.
They were accused of purveying "pornography for intellectuals"
by the Bishop of Galway. [...]
The
Message reunites them with Harrison and director-choreographer Nigel
Charnock, and marks a return to something like their best fighting form.
The show is an exploration of the role of the witness, which uses Harrison's
translation of the Oresteia as a skeletal framework on which to hang
first-person accounts culled from writers as disparate and dissonant
as Shakespeare, Fergal Keane and Primo Levi. It juxtaposes combative
movement with impassioned speech, comedy with tragedy, the horror of
the Holocaust with the comically bemused wonder of a fresh father. It
is compelling and as fast, funny and physically alarming as Volcano
in their prime.
Company
founders Fern Smith and Paul Davies are joined by Jan Knightley and
the unusually mature Jean Broughton. They start off in tuxedos, moaning
in the audience's ears like a Greek chorus before moving to the bare
stage washed in a soft blue light by lighting designer Andrew Jones.
Jones's input cannot be underestimated. With his help, Charnock and
the performers create a series of arresting images, accompanied by performances
that seem to defy the physical effort the cast are exerting. Davies's
ironic presence deftly complements Smith's in-your-face intensity, and
all share an infectious delight in the playful flouting of convention.
Sometimes
their provocative audacity goes too far, as when an account of wartime
genocide is followed by a bit of audience molestation with glove puppets,
followed by some Oresteia. Largely, though, the juxtapositions work.
The Message has the abstract quality of experimental dance. It
is muddled, inconclusive and short, but it rivets the attention. The
funny bits are very funny, while the serious bits can be deeply affecting.
The Message may be aimless but it is charges with adrenaline
and theatrical vigour. Volcano are back, and they are just as physically
and philosophically reckless as they ever were.
Nick
Curtis
The
Guardian, 17 February 1997
The Message, West Yorkshire Playhouse
Volcano
Theatre are back on the road with The Message, Nigel Charnock's
conflation of sundry texts from Tony Harrison to Fergal Keane, examining
the role of the witness to war and bloodshed down the ages. As always
with this company, language and meaning are filtered through hectic,
expressive physicality.
Several
ideas emerge in the course of 90 minutes. One is that the messenger
is endowed with an almost shamanistic power by society, another that
the witness's role is defined by context. We get large chunks of Harrison's
version of The Oresteia, in which carnage and mayhem are reported
with terrifying, propulsive urgency. But, quite rightly, Primo Levi's
account of children herded into concentration camp trucks or Keane's
graphic descriptions of genocide are delivered with uninflected quietness.
Whether
it be legend or documented fact, we rely on the power of the eye-witness:
the point the show implicitly makes is that some horrors are so great
that the only way to report them is with a studied calm that masks moral
anger.
The
Message works through contrast and paradox. It would be easy to
lapse into hand-wringing horror at man's endless inhumanity to man.
But child-murder, a constant theme, is juxtaposed with a father's moving
first-hand observation of childbirth; the stories of oppression and
slaughter matched by the music of resistance. What emerges is the imperative
to pass on the story and to bear witness. And, under Charnock's choreographed
direction, the four performers hurl themselves into the experience.
The endlessly inventive Paul Davies, Fern Smith and Jan Knightley do
most of the hard physical work without ever leaving June Broughton,
talking on the Clytemnestra role, out on a limb. At one performance
I saw, the action was punctuated by the crying of a baby: a strangely
moving reminder of life's ability to renew itself.
Time
Out, 12-19 March 1997
If
there was a Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Writers, Volcano Theatre
would be hauled up before court and charged with grievous textual harm.
For the last ten years the company have been assaulting the likes of
Shakespeare, Ibsen and Dylan Thomas with a brazen physical virtuosity
that has become their trademark. This time they have fed Tony Harrison's
translation of The Oresteia into their mincer for an exploration
of the role of the witness that also draws on writers as diverse as
Primo Levi, Shakespeare and BBC journalist Fergal Keane.
The
principal idea is a potent one and the physical work, as one would expect
from director Nigel Charnock, is often quite breathtaking. The four
performers hurl themselves around a bare stage throwing off jokes, obscenities
and a chaos of associations. When it works best, the action seems to
wriggle up through cracks in the text giving it a mesmerising physical
shape. At times the lights turn red or orange or blue and the stage
is flooded with outrage at a society capable of, say, matricide, or
wonder at the arrival of a newborn child. [...]
Kate
Stratton
The
Independent, 12 March 1997
[...]
What the message is exactly is unclear, but give that the basic outline
of the piece is provided by Tony Harrison's Oresteia, we can
assume that it is, probably, the medium. The four-strong cast slam into
each other, spewing the poet's headache-inducing word-brew ("Shagamemnon,
shameless and shaft-happy etc")as though gargling in their own
blood-libations. The sheer excess of the exercise is worth a look-in:
texts from Macbeth, Paul Celan, Primo Levi and journalist Fergal Keane
plus personal anecdotes, all spliced into nouveau-Aeschylus against
a techno-soundtrack and Andrew Jones's brash visuals. This is the closest
the Furies get to playing Wembley. [...]
The
Times, 7 March 1997
The
stage is bathed in sky-blue light, a Mediterranean sky-blue because
we will be taken first to Argos, where Clytemnestra awaits the husband
who butchered her daughter in exchange for a fair wind to Troy. The
light will be red ere long, and Volcano Theatre's cast of four will
either be wearing costumes the colour of blood or smeared with gobbets
of the stuff. For 75 minutes they will proclaim or confide in us tales
of slaughter, and seek to express the pain of it through vigorous movement.
[...]
Jeremy
Kingston
What's
On in London, 12-19 March 1997
At one point [...] the younger of the female performers leaps from the
stage and makes a bee-line for the stalls. Murmuring embarassing sweet
nothings in a Marlene Dietrich-style German drawl, she seized my hand
and pressed it to her heaving, sweaty breast. Nice try, love, but you
can't buy off a What's On critic as easily as that!
Douglas McPherson
Theatre
Magazine, May 1997
Volcano,
as the name suggests, erupt with passion, theatrical daring, breathless
physicality and some dazzling routines in their new show, The Message.
This sharply observed piece illustrates, within the framework of Tony
Harrison's Oresteia, and via a quirky selection of writings ranging
from Shakespeare to Fergal Keane, the role of the messenger through
history. The assumption is that whether legend, Greek tragedy, holocaust
or insurrection, the immediacy of the reaction and emotion of the eyewitness
account colours our perception of events.
As
always, Nigel Charnock's direction has a playful edge, and performers
Fern Smith, Jan Knightley and Paul Davies are inventive, focused, energised
and restlessly physical. [...]
Speeches
are often thrown on the run, pitched mid-air, strong on contraposition
of mood, silent screams, the impotence of anger, moral injustice. Stunning
visual effects are achieved on the wide open white stage, much is made
of timing and in the sensitive meshing between sound, texture, physical
presentation and text. Contrast the fervour of Agamemnon's homecoming
with Keane's account of genocide, Nazi death squads rounding up innocent
children, the raptured tomes of a new father. Yet this is no spectator
piece, rather it requires of us all an intense emotional involvement.
Volcano
are extraordinary performers and in this poignant yet boiterous piece
come close to enveloping the audience in the action.
Viola
von Harrach
