I Am The Wind
This is a marvellous production, but oh, how the play itself disappoints.
A
collaborative effort between the most widely performed Norwegian playwright
after Ibsen, an English translator and cast, and celebrated French director
Patrice Chereau (Intimacy, La Reine Margot ) and his team, even at 70
minutes long, this watery Waiting For Godot with its repetitive dialogue
really dragged.
Written by Jon Fosse (who can also, apparently, lay claim to being the most
widely performed living European dramatist) and translated by Simon Stephens
(does the fault lie with him?), this ocean-bound musing on depression and
suicidal thought starts strikingly on a bleak sandy shore, with little more
than a hint of the sea.
The One (the characters have no names, no
background) soaked and naked to the waist, is caught up in the arms of The
Other, and cradled, pieta-like, for several, extraordinary, silent minutes.
Then, in flashback, we see the two young men embark on what is presumably a
symbolic as well as an actual voyage further and further out to sea, away
from the safety of dry land and sheltered cove, until The One finally
plunges.
The staging is hypnotic. The auditorium floods with water as their raft-like
boat rises from the sea, a tilting island of temporary, precarious safety on
life’s journey. And the acting is no less impressive, with Jack Laskey (his
hair wild as Heathcliff, his eyes just as troubled) trying to understand the
disaffected apathy of Tom Brooke’s The One.
But the sheer banality of much of the script irritates, and ultimately, once
the water has retreated and this gloomy and unenlightening two-hander has
come full circle, it’s Richard Peduzzi’s kinetic set which remains in the
memory.
3/5
Young Vic, The Cut, SE1 8LZ
Tube: Southwark/ Waterloo
0207 922 2922
youngvic.org
Until May 21
£10.00 – £27.50
– Louise Kingsley
