Five Kinds Of Silence – Shelagh Stephenson, dir. Chris Loveless, White Bear Theatre, Kennington
Spoilers included!
In The Memory Of Water, Shelagh Stephenson’s 1997 radio play which was subsequently adapted for a film starring Julie Walters and Tom Wilkinson, three daughters are haunted by visions of their deceased mother. It turns out that the mother visits herself unto her daughters out of benevolence; to ensure that all is well with each of them before she departs them forever and is laid to rest.
It might well be attestable that Stephenson sought to create such benevolent hauntings as a remedy to the wicked post-mortem shadow that Billy casts over his wife Mary and two daughters, Janet and Susan, in her previous work, Five Kinds Of Silence, her Writer Guild Award-winning play concerning the perpetuating cycle of physical and sexual abuse that occurs within one family.
The White Bear Theatre in Kennington has is staging a production of Five Kinds Of Silence from January 29 to February 17, and its sparsely-furnished theatre seems perfectly suited to the bleak outlook of the subject matter. The staging area is tiny, and forty or seats are squeezed in at the edge of the playing area, meaning that a full house (and last night’s production was full) invites a creepy intimacy to proceedings.
The play opens with Billy, the brutal patriarch, relating a dream in which he is a dog with glorious hypotyposis: he talks of “jewels and metal and wood and meat” and seems particularly obsessed with the smell of things: blood, metal, fear, armpits. The dream, of which the cause is later revealed, is interrupted by his being shot dead by his daughters. When later questioned by police, lawyers and psychiatrists, the family, at first collectively and subsequently individually, projects its worldview by means of a shattered chronology; fragments of the past and present intermingle with flashbacks of varying degrees of reliability, which lends a Rashomon-style sensibility to the drama, where we cannot be entirely sure of the truths being emitted. Billy himself appears frequently, punctuating proceedings with his own recollections of his own broken childhood.
Familial abuse is cyclical, perpetuating and self-destructive, and essentially is focused around the key theme of the play, control. The play not only oddly suspends judgment of Billy, a tattoo-covered, bovver-booted obsessive-compulsive (the order in which he likes the groceries to be stored in the kitchen is humorously related by Mary) skinhead, but invites sympathy for him; he has suffered abuse at the hands of his own mother, an experience which shapes describes his own motivations and desires for control.
Control is ubiquitous; Billy tortures animals such as cats and goldfish because he can; he buys his wife and daughters red coats, and calls them his “army of redcoats” (an invocation of either Communism or Butlins, I couldn’t be sure which); he buys his daughters wedding rings to stave off the attentions of other men; and he describes his being drafted into the army, where everything is ship-shape and just-so, as “paradise”, the same word that Susan and Janet attribute to the jail cell when they are held after their father‘s murder. Janet and Susan, freed from their psychiatric ward for a day trip, write to their mother that they are free to buy Shredded Wheat and cookies for the first time. Control is ubiquitous; it leaks beyond the corners of the stage. Billy’s mother beat and abused him to exert her own form of control; did she also suffer at the wheel of abuse? And though the play ends with potential chink of light for the women, who is to say how their experience controls the relationships they are to have with their own children?
The performances throughout are outstanding. Anthony Hoskins provides solid support as the straight-man ensemble (Policeman / Lawyer / Psychiatrist), and provides the leading players enough room to shine. Violet Ryder plays Janet with schizophrenic energy, in turns hysterical and uncertain, beautiful and broken, unsure of herself and her place in this strange world she finds herself. Tessa Wood alone as Mary injects some lightness of touch into proceedings; the scenes where her timorous wife happily tells us that Billy would have been pleased that his shirt looks so neat as he lies on the ground filled with bullets, and proudly lists the groceries in the kitchen, are greatly needed to lift the air of unending doom. She movingly hints at a happier past, filled with innocence, dancing, and glasses of port & lemon, yet now is a mere husk of a woman, bereft of her dreams and unable to recognise the destructive power of her love for Billy.
Olivia Dennis is outstanding as Susan; bolshy, ashamed and gloriously twitchy, constantly gathering her cardigan around her like an aegis and stubbornly batting away any attempts at emotional extraction attempted by her inquisitors, including herself.
Also outstanding is Zach Lee as Billy; his is a dervish of a performance. At points he is squirming and crawling around the floor like Gollum, literally spitting out his recollections and daydreams with visceral intensity, and at others he lurks in the shadows of the stage, steering the thoughts and deeds of the women during their inquisition even after death like an aphotic, undead sentinel, making what use he can from the scant staging.
White Bear has a little gem on its hands here, and deserves to see many more full houses on its way through February. It only loses half a MAMPAM star as there was no interval in the 90-minute play, despite one being advertised online, causing much crossing of legs come the apex of the play, and probably not merely because of the graphic intimations of sexual abuse.
Verdict: 4.5 /5 MAMPAMs.
The MAMPAM info: Performance Dates: 29th January - 17th February 2013
Tuesday – Saturday at 7.30pm, Sundays at 6.00pm
Tickets: £12 (£10 Conc.)
Telephone sales: 0844 8700 887 (TicketSource: booking fee payable).
www.whitebeartheatre.co.uk
