Theatre goes down the Tube

10 April 2012

Gordon Anderson?s opening production as artistic director of ATC has the novelty value of being set in a disused Tube station, but still struggles to enliven the tortuous meanderings of Bernard-Marie Koltes?s writing.

The setting is well-matched to Koltes?s 1987 play, which ekes out a verbal power struggle between a street dealer and a passing stranger he takes to be a potential punter. It is a simple two-hander reminiscent of Edward Albee?s Zoo Story and it turns an illicit situation into a metaphor for murkily competitive, homoerotic human relations.

The play from the French writer better known over here for Roberto Zucco, is written in the form of a classical, dialectical discourse in a contemporary setting. If that sounds solemn and uncompromising, that?s because it is. Translated by Jeffrey Wainwright, Kolt?s?s writing mixes the pastoral and the urban, the epic and the mundane, the moon and the gutter.

As with Roberto Zucco, the story plays teasingly with the uncertain identity of its two characters, but elaborate metaphors and parenthetical pile-ups also make their dialogue exasperatingly obtuse.

Anderson?s decision to produce the play in an Underground station promises to mitigate the high-mindedness of Koltes?s discourse and bring it down to earth, where it needs to belong. The atmosphere is thick with damp and musty odours, while exit signs and ticket booths become emblems of rootless transience. But Anderson?s static, promenade direction has the two actors standing and delivering long, complex orations at one another with too little reference to their surroundings.

The piece is passionately and articulately acted, but this doesn?t stop you losing the threads of the argument on which the encounter hangs. David Westhead?s dealer looks more like he trades antiques and wouldn?t last two minutes on the street today with CCTV cameras and no hood on his jacket. Still, he cuts a tenacious pedant who would certainly put you off dabbling in drugs for life. Zubin Varla?s client, meanwhile, looks more like he?s got a habit ? even if part of that habit is looking indignant and affronted. The passion and commitment of both these actors is not in question ? the wilful turgidity of Koltes?s writing is.

In The Solitude Of Cotton Fields

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