There are several thematic similarities in the first double bill of the Bristol Old Vic Summer Festival. Both Brad Birch’s Black Mountain (☆☆☆) and Jez Butterworth’s The River (☆☆☆☆) take place in rural cottages, both contain ominous birds and excruciating splinters, and both keep close to their chest narrative mystery and imagined ghosts. If Butterworth’s piece is more assured, both in writing and production, both works show that an isolated cabin is a place for sanctuary and a location where reckonings run free in gothic grand guignol.
Anna Whealing keeps the tension bubbling in her production of Birch’s Black Mountain. Rebecca (Mira Edrisingha) and Paul (Fletcher Garrard) are conducting crisis talks for their relationship, ‘this is not a holiday, but a place to talk’ she reminds him curtly at the beginning. Paul is desperate to make amends, Rebecca needs to see him suffer, to feel the same pain that his philandering has caused her to feel. The isolated cabin contains nothing but stale coffee and Stephen King books on the shelves. Soon like the great chronicler of horror, things begin to supernaturally take hold. Are Paul’s injuries, a splinter, blisters on his feet, bugs biting him while ignoring Rebecca, a reckoning of his sins, or just everyday misfortune? Is Rebecca, like a revenging fury, conjuring this? Is the entrance of the third woman (Tumi Olufewo) a malefic reality or a specter casting a shadow on the pair?
Birch’s parable is insightful in the way that once trust is broken in a relationship there is no way back, how love curdles into wanting your significant other to suffer. Whether the other woman is there or not Birch never clarifies this, her presence shapes and haunts their relationship. It’s clever and perplexing, but unfortunately, Birch throws in a hatchet job finale, where the bunny boiler trope comes to the surface. The air is let out of the balloon, it breaks the tension. Horror on stage works best in suggestion, the moment we get the reveal it just thuds, not helped by an awkwardly staged climax.
Up until then, Whealing’s production manages to inject tension as Leo Palmer’s sound design insistently thrums portentous threats in the background and lights flicker. Holly Coulson’s abstract set of five trees dotted around the space and an axe hanging ominously from the back wall (Chekhov’s axe) give us a sense of the isolation the two face as the tension piles up.
Garrard’s Paul is a posh manchild, clearly unsuited to country living. In pitching him quite so whiny though, we as an audience have no one to cling onto, his befuddlement and public-school stutters make him a bit pathetic from the start, and his gradual breaking down physically is almost played as comedy. Edrisingha is matter-of-fact in her approach, she lists her need for him to suffer with such practicality that the ache behind the wronged partner doesn’t shine through. It’s Olufewo as Helen, the other woman, who shines; her technique, poise, and truth on stage mark her out as a breakout potential star.
Butterworth’s The River keeps things closer to its chest. We begin with a man welcoming his new partner to his secluded wooden cabin. He wants to take her out fishing, she wants to finish reading To the Lighthouse, she says it’s just got to the good bit. Like Virginia Woolf’s novel of loss and Differences in Perception, Butterworth’s play is slippery in meaning and themes, its dialogue deliberately obscuring rather than revealing, its work of little action and all atmosphere. It is also compelling in Jon-Luke Goodman’s confident production.
Just as we feel we have a grasp on what is happening, the scene changes, we see the man on the phone to the police, a woman has vanished by the river, and then a different woman enters. The scenes play out with subtle variations, what is real, what is a dream, what is past, what is present, all is shrouded in enigma. It could become pseudo-heavy, the skill of Butterworth, our great contemporary playwright, is that he manages to compel with every sentence and silence. He can write big plot-heavy works (he has after all written for Bond) but here he demonstrates that his dialogue crackles. In a play where the action is constrained to the gutting of a fish, it feels urgent in every one of its 80 minutes.
Joseph Stanley makes a compelling man, unreadable; a man of nature, a romantic, a killer? He never leaves the stage, clad in a lumberjack shirt and dad jeans, he is a man born of practical need with a poet’s soul. Occasionally Butterworth overdoes melodious monologues, but Stanley delivers them with precision. Interestingly, I wonder if the two women could have been swapped, Olivia Henmati has a flirtatious air that perhaps works better with the second woman rather than the Virginia Woolf reading new lover, while Laura Jennifer Banks brings a more ethereal presence to the space, but perhaps the casting demonstrates the interchangeable nature of the lovers, as they waft on in the same shade of red, as they both discover a painting of a mysterious women with her face scratched off. Are they all ghosts of the same women?
There is even time for a last-gasp electrical surge, showing theatre can provide goosebumps with a simple surprise. It may only be the first week of a month of contemporary performances ahead of us, but it will be hard to top The River for its accomplished work in this showcase.
Kris Hallett- life as theatre 