Lorna Irvine reviews a production filled with performances that are 'superb, beautiful and brimming with vitality.'
Director Stewart Laing cements his reputation as one of the most exciting directors working in Britain today with this, the updating of Pamela Carter's Slope, last produced by his Untitled Projects in 2006.
This particular iteration is intimately staged, but in the most discomfiting way possible- as though the entire audience are about to be hauled into the headmaster's office for skipping class. The studio space is small, cold and the chairs squirmingly uncomfortable. This is further compounded by the fact that filming is taking place, streamed live on KILTR, and little meta tricks played.
The obsessive love triangle between French poets Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine and Verlaine's long-suffering, loving wife Mathilde plays out in that tension: this triangle has sharp angles. Paul Verlaine is an alcoholic, neurotic bully. Owen Whitelaw invests him with a perfect dark sensuality that initially lures Mathilde in (''My little carrot fairy'') but sours as the marriage falls apart (''What, her? -Old carrot face?''). He may be a dark-eyed sexy man, but he is also a vicious, selfish bastard. Mathilde (Jessica Hardwick) is pulled around by her hair, and, threatened with a belting, pushed into a corner. It's brutal and unsparing.
Mathilde's restraint and stoicism is wonderfully portrayed: Hardwick's eyes are always darting and her mouth twitching, trying to push down the sorrow, anger and fear at her husband's violent temper. A ticking clock aligns with her laboured breathing, and the effect is at once soporific and tense. She remains dressed in a frock and cross throughout, reinstating her stiff religious faith. As time passes, and she has his baby Georges (a frighteningly realistic looking baby doll with fine, downy hair), she grows in confidence, chiding her increasingly pathetic husband: 'I don't understand how someone like you can write poetry.' It is she who files for divorce.
The poison in the wine glass, tempting Verlaine out of his loveless marriage and into pissoirs and drinking dens in London, is the crude Arthur Rimbaud (James Edwyn): younger, ripe and unwashed, completely immoral, taking his mother issues out on this once happy union. He is the only one who seemingly remains unchanged, completely dead behind the eyes, slamming into the walls.
All three cast members are superb, beautiful and brimming with vitality, and Ian Spink's choreography complements such control. Seething with visceral staging choices, this performance allows the audience to become voyeurs to the destruction. If Verlaine and Rimbaud are poets as rock stars, they are of the very worst kind: they fuck and fight like animals on crumpled duvet covers on the floor, so close that bruises and bite marks can be seen. Theirs is the seedy faded glamour of Nicholas Roeg's Performance, or Led Zeppelin's ugly macho swagger, a comedown from drugs and booze where daylight seeps in and things are revealed to be used and washed-up. The money has been spent and the affair between both men is now at an impasse, with only the dregs of absinthe left. Yet, the humour too is deadly. A slap with a wet fish? Laing goes there, making a humorous homily real.
Carter realises that these men are tools, in both senses of the word, and cannot resist playing with language. As Rimbaud teaches Verlaine slang for masturbation, he tries to put it into grammatical French subjunctives. 'He wanks, she wanks, they wank...’—‘SHE does not wank,' spits the misogynist Verlaine. Even the shooting scene is played for uneasy laughs, with Verlaine announcing he doesn't feel too well.
Interrupting the performance, Edwyn has a slogan daubed onto his chest which goads, 'Are We New Yet?' A similar question is taped to the side of the video. Innovators, in the form of dance choreographer Pina Bausch and her Rite of Spring ballet and American singer/poet Patti Smith, who was influenced by Rimbaud's A Season in Hell,are referenced in video and print-outs which are respectively shown and passed around. Both women are entirely apposite—both producers of layered artistic provocation—exactly like Untitled Projects.
Slope performs at the Citizens until November 22 before transferring to the Traverse from November 26-29.
Photo credit: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan
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