Pool (no water)
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
June 18 – July 5 2008
Is it human nature to want our friends to fail so we can feel better about ourselves? How do we justify it? Do we embrace the feeling? Do we deny it? Or, do we exploit it?
Pool (no water) by Mark Ravenhill shoves these questions in our faces. Playing at the Red Stitch Actors Theatre until July 5, the hour-long production is intimate, in your face, and shockingly self-reflecting.
The play is a narrative told by four struggling artists who take a trip to visit Sally, the only one from their art college group who is successful. When an accident causes Sally to enter a coma, the jealous friends must decide whether her bruised and battered body can become their work of art.
Pool (no water) was originally created for the English physical theatre company Frantic Assembly in 2006. Mark Ravenhill wrote in The Guardian that is was the photographs of Nan Goldin, “her intimate portraits of bohemian, drug-addled, multi sexual friends” that inspired him.
In the Red Stitch production, director Simon Stone has taken the opposite approach from the original production. He chooses an confronting, straightforward dialogue with the audience. Instead of the excessive movement used in physical theatre, he uses the contrast between loud and soft, blocked staging and confined space.
The set, designed by Peter Mumford, is a small triangular space with no furniture and no props. Small black tiles, spaced by white grout, cover the floor and walls. A drain in the centre suggests a dark shower, toilet or swimming pool with no water.
Aided by Danny Pettingill’s lighting – fluorescent flickering bulbs, spotlights and lighting from below – the atmosphere is one of closeness and claustrophobia. Do the artists want to get out or are they happy to be confined there?
It is important with such an intimate piece that the cast be a collective whole. With no props and no new characters, it is up to the four people onstage to keep our attention. Each movement, facial expression, and tone of voice counts.
The ensemble cast of Dion Mills, David Whiteley, Jessamy Dyer and Melissa Chambers are each caricatures, yet all equal parts. The sum of their convictions connects us to the story.
They claw at the walls as if to escape, yet seem comforted by their presence. They cling to each other, then drift apart in a Diazepam induced high. They love, hate, exploit, feel guilty, need, abandon. They scream ‘cunt’ again and again.
They are trying to find their independence, yet not wanting to at the same time. Every decision, which draws them farther into jealousy and hate, is never made by one. They cannot seem to recall who made any decision. It is a collective.
The almost full audience in the Red Stitch theatre seemed to enjoy the ups and downs. They laughed at the eccentricities and gasped at the horrors of humanity.
The only time the energy level and flow of the narrative decreased is when the actors were sitting. Because of the location of the seats in the audience it was difficult to see the floor and therefore difficult to connect.
And maybe the audience laughed because they saw themselves in these extremes – an exaggeration of our society and yet a reflection of it.
Yes, it is a story about a bunch of drugged up artists who make art for heroin babies and have to watch their friends die from AIDS or cancer. But Simon Stone’s production makes it about us as well. We may not be struggling artists who take photographs of our friend’s unconscious bruised body, but perhaps we do feel better about ourselves when someone else fails.
Is it bad to feel good when someone else is down? Are we all capable of what these artists did? Can we learn from our mistakes?
In the end it is turned on us.
