Willy Russell's Rita was dead right about the radio being the best place for Peer Gynt, but sometimes radio plays can succeed brilliantly when they're done on stage. This show -- which runs until July 9 -- proves the point. Staged in a dank post-industrial space underneath Waterloo Station, it's an exhilarating piece of theatre staged by a young director with an exceptionally clear vision of what she wants to achieve and how to create it.
Kate McGregor and Theatre6 have taken two early radio plays by David Mamet set in early 1930s America, woven them together into a seamless whole and reimagined them visually without losing anything of their original qualities. It's still radio, but with an extra dimension or two added. The sound design is exceptional, as are the set and costumes and the choice of space. The Old Vic Tunnels is a dank series of brick vaults where trains rattle overhead and the air seems more suitable for growing mushrooms than for making theatre. Last week's rainstorms are still dripping through on to the floor, though luckily not badly enough to ruin the electrics. Think Southwark Playhouse, only more so. It's an ideal place for Mamet's story of a doomed inventor crushed by the forces of big business, a 1930s narrative of extreme hope and despair.
Charles Lang is a lowly factory worker with his own secret invention, an engine that runs on water. Mamet's text doesn't need to spell out the implications; on the one hand it could revolutionise industrial processes, while on the other it would put Big Oil out of business. Charles is a little man, but he's no fool, and realises the risks of trying to patent his machine. His wariness doesn't save him from the ruthless men who want to destroy him, but he manages to keep his plans out of their clutches. Mamet consciously uses the conventions of 1930s radio melodrama but his writing is good enough to avoid falling into pastiche. On stage, McGregor's exceptional cast create their own music and live sound effects using Foley techniques. I was bored rigid when I saw Katie Mitchell's actors doing something similar in Waves because it seemed just a self-indulgent display of look-how-clever-we-are technique. But in this show the sounds and music all have a dramatic purpose.
The performance opens with Mr Happiness, a half-hour monologue by a radio agony uncle, dispensing advice on relationships to his letter writers. David Burt delivers just the right combination of warmth and steeliness in a flawless performance, while shadowy images flicker behind him. This half-hour piece sets the 1930s mood of America, caught between the despair of economic depression and the optimism of the new scientific age, and foreshadows some of the themes of The Water Engine.
There's a cast of 11 in this production, most of them relative newcomers, but every role is acted with great precision and conviction. Hats off to designers Amy Cook and Carla Goodman, sound designer Godlove Mensah and lighting designer Will Evans for helping to create a show with the kind of production values usually seen in theatres that have budgets ten times as large as this one. The comprehensive programme (something many fringe companies neglect) contains not only some excellent photography by Veronika Lukasova but an interview with Kate McGregor which shows a real theatrical intelligence at work. What she has done is this show is blend together techniques of realism and non-realism so that the play works on several levels. But there's never any feeling of visual and aural overload, and the production never substitutes style for substance.
I thoroughly recommend this show to anyone who has the chance to catch it in its final week.
Comments