The vast, barrel vaulted nether regions of Brunel’s Temple Meads station in Bristol is the location of the Loco Klub, home to Invisible Circus of local fame. Currently hosting a revival by Red Oak Theatre of Jez Butterworth’s atmospheric 2012 play, part of the space is given over to April Dalton’s expressionistic wigwam of a riverside cottage or hut, the location of The Man’s adventures in seduction. This is a play that aspires to literature, the language being at times self consciously poetic in, for example, its references to watching a naked woman swimming and eulogizing over childhood fishing trips. Much of the piece is descriptive.
The nub of the thing is The Man’s (Jack Hammett) relationship with a sequence of women, each of whom has been brought to the retreat for the purposes of seduction and who in turn are annoyed to find evidence of the others – namely a drawing of a woman in a red dress. The emotional attachment to the women seems to be the same, with director, Matt Holmquist, giving equal weight to each of the relationships, which consequently become interchangeable. The point is underlined by the two women (1 and 2 we’ll call them) actually mirroring each other’s movements in an oddly surrealistic, dumb-show exchange.
Mr Hammett gives The Man a puzzling urgency of movement, perhaps a sign of guilt, perhaps a symptom of the fact that he seems unable to form anything like a stable relationship with any of his conquests. In this it appears he is following in his father’s footsteps, his father having bragged to his son about his amorous youthful exploits in the remote cabin. Like father like son, as the river flows in a continuum through time. The point is driven home by the women not being identified by ‘given’ names, only the labels: The Woman, The Other Woman and Another Woman. A final ‘Another Woman’ appears at the end in a similar red dress, just in case we hadn’t got the point. Despite this the two women (Katherine Stevens and Olivia Elsden) do their best and have some success in giving some emotional content to what appear to be little more than placeholders for objects of desire and conquest.
The overall tone of this production is one of melancholy, which is picked up in Yuan Hu’s sound design (which had a particular resonance in the somewhat cool, damp surroundings of the old ash pits).
Jez Butterworth is now a well established writer of the first rank, his most recent The Ferryman having enjoyed a notable success at the Royal Court earlier this year and we must be grateful to Red Oak for giving us a chance to revisit this earlier piece which has previously benefitted from the talents of Dominic West and Hugh Jackman. ★★☆☆☆ Graham Wyles 16th September 2017
