Tag Archives: Barbican

Lay Down Your Burdens

★★★

Barbican

LAY DOWN YOUR BURDENS at the Barbican

★★★

“It was a genuinely mixed experience, and sometimes that is refreshing in its own way.”

Billed as a piece of ‘radically tender dance theatre’ Lay Down Your Burdens is a brave, if peculiar, piece of immersive theatre.

We are welcomed to a local pub, by friendly landlady (Sara Turner) where the three locals and the bartender consistently mask their respective pain by drinking, and dancing, and generally being merry. When they are joined by an American stranger (Donald Hutera) who is ripped open and vulnerable with grief, they begin to teach him a new way of looking at life. Interspersed with audience participation, immersive games and calls and responses, as well as stunning contemporary dance, this story unfolds as each character delves into their personal unhappiness.

Choreographer/director Rhiannon Faith devised this piece with the cast, and it has that muddled feeling that often plagues devised theatre. There is a lot going on, far too many characters, and the script is at times almost painful. However, where this piece soars is when it stays away from the strange plot that ties it down, and focusses on the abstract, on the audience participation and the dance.

Something that works astonishingly well is the sound design by Anna Clock. Anna is on stage paying cello, along with violinist India Shan Merrett, giving an ethereal live beauty to the performance. But Anna is also recording the audience responses, and at the end they layer them into a melting soundscape, adding meaning to the words and chants we’d shared. My favourite moment in the piece was where audience members were invited to share into a microphone the things they loved. It was moving and subtle and completely beautiful. To hear these back, layered with people’s responses to other prompts throughout the piece, was a stroke of immersive genius.

The dance was also extraordinary. Dominic Coffey, Shelley Eva Haden, Sam Ford and Finetta Sidgwick move across the stage in frantic, weird contortions. They represent pain, grief and struggle through their bodies but it is also lovely to see them dancing a jig in an early scene. All of them are very strong dancers, with captivating stage presences, but a standout is Haden who tells the story of a woman losing touch with her inner child through a beautiful series of gyrating agitated solos.

The set, by designer Noemi Daboczi is simple, a bar at the centre and booths behind, but it can be whatever the performers make it, and it feels eerily like a local pub.

This piece is hard to review, because some parts I hated, and some I loved. Every time I would get on board with the production, it would completely change into something else, often something that was baffling or tonally startling. I would see another production by Rhiannon Faith Company, but I cannot wholeheartedly recommend this one. I found the message confusing, and even at times problematic – there was a sense of toxic positivity and no questions around alcohol as a ticket to happiness. However, the idea of finding the joy in small things is beautiful, and important. It was a genuinely mixed experience, and sometimes that is refreshing in its own way.


LAY DOWN YOUR BURDENS at the Barbican

Reviewed on 22nd November 2023

by Auriol Reddaway

Photography by Foteini Christofilopoulou

 

 

More shows reviewed by Auriol:

Lovetrain2020 | ★★★★ | Sadler’s Wells Theatre | November 2023
Mates In Chelsea | ★★★ | Royal Court | November 2023
Flip! | ★★★★ | Soho Theatre | November 2023
Sputnik Sweetheart | ★★★ | Arcola Theatre | October 2023
Boy Parts | ★★★★ | Soho Theatre | October 2023
Casting The Runes | ★★★ | Pleasance Theatre | October 2023
Elephant | ★★★★★ | Bush Theatre | October 2023
Hamnet | ★★★ | Garrick Theatre | October 2023
Gentlemen | ★★★★ | Arcola Theatre | October 2023
This Is Not A Circus: 360 | ★★★★★ | Jacksons Lane | October 2023

Lay Down Your Burdens

Lay Down Your Burdens

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The Revenger’s Tragedy

★★★★★

Barbican

The Revenger’s Tragedy

The Revenger’s Tragedy (La tragedia del vendicatore)

Barbican

Reviewed – 4th March 2020

★★★★★

 

“The partnership between Cheek by Jowl and Piccolo creates an energetic work of the most satisfying and unforgettable kind”

 

We enter the theatre to an open stage paradoxically shut tight by a wooden barrier, stretching end to end. Whatever is about to happen must be barred from view until the time is right. It’s a blockade both stark and titilating—an arresting alternative to the traditional curtain, and—like a wall surrounding a citadel under attack—a hint of bloody conflict to come. We are about to encounter the grand guignol world of Jacobean tragedy.

The empty space distinguished by one, bold item of physical design is, of course, a hallmark of set designer Nick Ormerod, founder member of Cheek by Jowl, just as the bold, flamboyant acting style that is to follow, is equally the hallmark of director Declan Donnellan, the other founder of the company. In recent years, Donnellan and Ormerod have worked with a number of other world famous companies—and for this production of The Revenger’s Tragedy, now assigned to the authorship of Thomas Middleton—Cheek by Jowl has signed up with the Piccolo Theatre of Milan, a company equally well known for its reinterpretation of the classics. It’s a genius collaboration.

As the play begins, the company, dressed in modern suits and dresses, dance on stage. This is a stylised line up—the actors free to create their own signature movements—as the protagonist, Vindice (Fausto Cabra), introduces them. He swiftly paints for us a picture of a Renaissance court steeped in the most lurid vices known to men. We discover that Vindice (whose name means vengeance) has a particular reason to know each character, and their vices, well. Starting at the top, with the lustful, amoral old Duke, who has murdered Vindice’s fiancée for rejecting his advances, Vindice plans an elaborate poison and blood soaked revenge on the whole pack of them. This court is a crazy, upside down world where sons betray their mothers, mothers pimp their daughters, bastards commit incest, and Vindice, by no means immune from craziness himself, employs the skull of his dead lover Gloriana to ensnare the Duke. So that makes it a win for necrophilia as well.

Ormerod’s set design reveals this world in a series of sliding panels in his wall. At any point in the drama, we may see stained glass windows in a sunlit cathedral peeking through. At other moments, backdrops are revealed featuring enlarged Renaissance portraits, whose coolly beautiful subjects either gaze quizzically on all the nastiness unfolding on stage, or, if in groups, are deep in intricate plottings of their own. The backdrops are the light illuminating the murkiness going on downstage, where the characters more often than not, are peering around edges, or donning dark disguises. The lighting collaboration between Judith Greenwood (Cheek by Jowl) and Claudio de Pace (Piccolo) manages these carefully delineated spaces adroitly, and the final view of the stage—with Ormerod’s wall back in place—is a memorable view of the word “vendetta” bathed in appropriately blood red lighting.

Amidst all the jewels of this production, and in the spotlight from beginning to end, are Donnellan’s directing, and Piccolo’s acting. From the dance of future death that opens the show, Donnellan uses physical movement to great effect to show the characters’ intentions. This is particularly necessary in a production where the spoken words are in Italian, and the only English is abridged to short, single lines in a translator above the stage. (Though these lines are well chosen and designed to be picked up by the eye in a single glance.) Donnellan is well served by his actors, with particularly strong performances from Fausto Cabra, and Massimiliano Speziani as the reprobate Duke. The Duke’s equally corrupt sons, played by Ivan Alovisio, Flavio Capuzzo Dolcetta, Christian Di Filippo, David Meden, and Errico Liguori, arrange and rearrange themselves in and around each other in a world of constantly shifting alliances, interspersed by acts of lurid physical violence. It gets so gruesome by the end that the audience can only laugh. Special mention should also be made of the work of Pia Lanciotti who does a brilliant doubling of the faithless Duchess, and Vindice’s mother Gratiana.

This production of The Revenger’s Tragedy is designed to stretch one’s experience of the theatre. It is not for the squeamish. But then, some of the best experiences require a willingness to suspend one’s own expectations. The partnership between Cheek by Jowl and Piccolo creates an energetic work of the most satisfying and unforgettable kind.

 

Reviewed by Dominica Plummer

Photography by Masiar Pasquali

 


The Revenger’s Tragedy

Barbican until 7th March

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:
The Knight Of The Burning Pestle | ★★★★ | June 2019
Peeping Tom: Child (Kind) | ★★★ | January 2020

 

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