Simon Jenner May 19th 2024
“I have no memory of my parents. They’re a smudge. And nothing left… to hang my sentimentality on.” The Tower, Emma Kelly’s three-hander vision of what the near-ish, noir-ish future might wreak plays at Fishing Museum directed by Debbie Fitzgerald till May 19th
What happens though when someone else arrives whose bonds – and memories – are far stronger? Are they better adjusted to chaos?
We’ve fore-suffered all, perhaps like Tiresias: it sems so familiar, but. A dystopic future of catastrophic floods might seem predictable. What we don’t envisage is the slow adapting of generations, of the determination to survive, and sometimes to let go. That’s the strength of Kelly’s vision, its uniqueness.
Still there’s more than just vision in this absorbing play that uses overlapping dialogue, seamless choreography from Charlie Hendren, a hypnotic compilation of a score than never intrudes (its riff of Max Richter’s violin ostinato particularly evocative), and a poetic language anchoring the singularity of Kelly’s world. It will literally transport you.
It helps too that A/B Smith, aka Boblete’s watery projections – sometimes lapping reflections, occasionally sea-storms, even projected lights – play on the upstage wall, technically realised by Fraser Smith.
Use of props is elegant and emblematic: a raft, short planks, rope, an upturned bicycle on a stand, ragged outgrown clothing. Lorraine Yu also plucks a traditional instrument, alternating with her vocals.
Viv (Lorraine Yu) first sings in a wild elegiac cry then speaks those blank words as she prepares a fishing rod, declamatory, perhaps a personality gone rigid with fear and experience.
We soon swivel down the barrel-shaped room to Toni (Isabella McCarthy-Sommerville) and her mother Fran (Sarah Widdas).
The energy is wholly different: domestic, occasionally fractious in finely chiselled overlapping dialogue, but always loving. Fran keeps litanising “I’m gone” but despite her exhortations, Toni isn’t prepared to leave her.
There was a grandmother too. Toni feels guilty about that, guilty about the dog, and the cured meat, guilty about even the hint of leaving her mother at the top of a council house block surrounded by water and bloated dead bodies eddying round in a permanent swirl.
Fran though feels – after Toni wants to play Titanic (“a bit near the bone” says Fran) or enact Thelma and Louise yet again, Fran’s mother’s favourites – that it’s time to move on. For Toni. And there’s something Toni’s not telling us.
Widdas’ warmly realised Fran though keeps apparating as Toni makes her jerry-built raft flounder over the unrecognisable world.
Toni repeats 10 points about travelling over water the emergency government gave out, and the three threes. Three minutes without air, three hours without shelter, three days without food. Such anaphoric language is drink to an actor who can make something emotional of it.
Soon solitude and the sheer frustration of finding things only to find they’re not human gradually radiates a hopelessness and torpor that only leads down. It’s quite a long section but we’re nowhere near the crispy-fleshed end.
It’s where any actor not solely involved in a one-person show needs to generate an energy that becomes an envelope that then snaps to integrate with others.
McCarthy-Sommerville, recently returned from her Off-Broadway run and more awards, is an actor you know will deliver anything credible with burning truth and transform a broken silence with a mind of winter or indeed summer. Bluntly, a production including her bespeaks its quality.
The third longest section involves all three actors as Yu’s Viv rescues Toni, and quarantines her. Yu’s Viv moves from declamatory rigidity and fright to a more vocally modulated trust, always edgy, always provisional, potentially hostile.
The tower of the title is a real place, where an upper echelon ordains a workforce, and Viv’s somewhere in middle management, barking dictatorial orders for the good of others, and their survival. Offstage characters are invoked.
Toni though has never had to conform to the old hierarchies, and soon rebels. There’s other reasons, an offstage worker Ben, and the permanent presence of Fra who exhorts Toni to actions she herself never quite managed to realise: climate change protests for instance.
Can Viv and Toni accommodate to each other, and what is the truth of the hierarchy? Can’t Toni inject a wholly new way of doing things? What can that bicycle do for us asks Viv? More than a Roman viaduct perhaps. And are you taking precautions?
The working-out of this drama moves at a seraphic 70 minutes, never too slow, and at one welcome point accelerating frantically towards the end: we might enjoy another moment of speed, but otherwise the play holds our attention rapt. There’s one moment of laughter.
An occasional over-declamation at the start and the need for preoccupation when delivering a speech (as McCarthy-Sommerville always finds) will soon un-wrinkle any small moments of disconnect.
This is a riveting and persuasive vision of the future. Beautifully realised by creatives and cast, it should play at a London venue like Jermyn Street, as well as those off-beat venues it so lends itself to.
The Tower
Wild Elk Productions
Fishing Museum
Directed by Debbie Fitzgerald Lighting and Video Projection Artist A/B Smith, aka Boblete. Technical Operation Fraser Smith, Choreography Charlie Hendren
Till May 19th