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REVIEWS Ditch by Beth Steel A High Tide Festival/Old Vic production at the Old Vic Tunnels, London Until June 26, 2010 Let me preface this by saying I like a bit of comfort. I know it is sinful but I do. It's why I have given up on Shakespeare's Globe and why I am wary of site–specific theatre. (Katrina last year at the Oxo Tower was a notable exception). All that painstaking effort to get "health and safety" right in some awful, usually damp and derelict hellhole and all for what? For Hecuba? I wouldn't mind if we were short of theatre spaces in this country but thanks to the National Lottery (and all those poor people buying tickets) we are awash with gloriously refurbished buildings most with gaping holes in their schedules and not much in them. So I was not in a good mood as I trod along to a cavernous series of tunnels that have been opened up for this show underneath Waterloo Station. One enters through a hole in the wall labelled Tunnel 228 and passes through chilly, dank, tunnels housing a series of eerie installations while commuter trains thunder overhead. Thankfully the one tunnel set aside for the 'auditorium' has comfy raked cinema seats but the smell and the mud does make its presence felt. Remember to dress down.
All this was in aid of the Old Vic's latest venture, a co–production with Norfolk's High Tide Festival of debut play by the young playwright Beth Steel. We are in the dystopian future. Is there any other kind I hear you ask? I want someone to set up a prize for playwrights who write happy plays about the future, they could call it the Orwell–Got–It–Wrong Prize. Anyway, if dystopian future wasn't enough we are also in Yorkshire, in the rain. Global warming has taken its toll a nd much of the country is underwater and government has been reduced to a number of fascist strongmen patrolling for "illegals" whilst most of the young men are away fighting a brutal war over a pipeline. This outpost, its numbers dwindling, struggles to retain a semblance of civilisation in the face of an inevitable onset of global war. They are fed and watered by the wise old Mrs Peel (the great Dearbhla Molloy) whose young charge Megan (Matti Houghton) gets romantically entangled with one of the young newcomers to the security team. Water is severely rationed ("you get a bath every birthday") and they live off deer, all parts of the animal. Talking about the past is forbidden. Toimes is 'aaaard. The play purports to be a clear–eyed look at how we might behave in such circumstances but it has one great flaw. If you create an imagined world you have to clearly delineate its parameters, as in the best sci–fi. There must be some internal logic. Here we are not told enough about what has happened or why they bother putting up with it all, so it is hard to engage emotionally with the dilemmas of this bunch of under written and sadly over–acted characters. The usual retinue of dystopian climate change disaster scenarios are present but this litany of misery takes us nowhere dramatically. All credit is due to the extensive design team led by Takis, whose staging is extraordinary, but is sadly undercut by the banality of this play and its 'shouty' execution. |
