Tag Archives: The Vaults

Inside Voices

Inside Voices
★★★

VAULT Festival

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Inside Voices

Inside Voices

The Vaults

Reviewed – 23rd January 2019

★★★

 

“The actors are confident and energetic, and the piece has wonderful moments of intrigue”

 

The 2019 VAULT Festival has officially begun! As I walked into the neon-lit labyrinth of The Vaults it was less grand opening, more business as usual: numerous theatre spaces and a packed schedule of shows. The space was The Pit, and the show was ‘Inside Voices’. Labelled as a dark comedy, this piece follows three Southeast Asian women attempting to break free from the constraints imposed by their race, culture, religion and gender. It has been published by Nick Hern books as one of the top seven new plays at The Vaults this year, so I was excited and optimistic as I took my seat.

The play starts very simply: three women sitting around a food tray eating and talking. It was an early opportunity to show the audience what great chemistry these actresses had, and it was a pleasure to watch. Instantly we knew what the relationship was between these three women, who used each other’s company as a chance to escape the pressure of their normal lives. Suhaili Safari particularly shines as the young idealist Nisa, and had buckets of energy throughout the show. Indeed, the whole piece was peppered with these simple but effective moments, be it Fatimah tenderly rubbing Nisa’s belly when she feels sick or the characters constantly talking over each other, which anyone in a close friendship group will be all too familiar with. It was in these moments that the tragedy of the piece really stuck out, and we learned of the tough experiences that forged these women into who they are.

Sadly, these moments fell few and far between, and what started as an effective and subtle drama slowly became a more polemic comment on intersectionality and the #MeToo movement. In these moments, you could feel a shift in the audience mentality. Whereas in the start of the play we were being invited to watch and search for our own interpretations, here we were being told what to think. This is perhaps easier for an audience, but not nearly as enjoyable or rewarding. These moments did drag and left me craving for the more intimate, seemingly mundane but charged scenes between these interesting women.

This show has a strong identity to it, and its message of social oppression and the battle these women face will resonate with a modern audience. The actors are confident and energetic, and the piece has wonderful moments of intrigue. I only wish that I could have been kept intrigued for longer.

Reviewed by Edward Martin

Photography courtesy Lazy Native

 

Vault Festival 2019

Inside Voices

Part of VAULT Festival 2019

 

 

 

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Blue Departed

Blue Departed
★★★★

VAULT Festival

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Blue Departed

Blue Departed

The Vaults

Reviewed – 23rd January 2019

★★★★

 

“a gripping and desperately sad study of pain, addiction and loss”

 

Written by Serafina Cusack and performed by three members of the Anima Theatre Company, Blue Departed is a remarkably intense piece of work. A modern, urban version of Dante’s descent through the nine circles of Hell, it details the utter despair endured by a drug addict (brilliantly captured by Mark Conway) who has just lost the woman he loves (Rebecca Layoo) to a heroin overdose. Cast in the role of Dante, he relays his suffering in a near-continuous series of exchanges with his dead lover, who ‘speaks’ to him through interrogations, recriminations and reminiscences – angry, heartbroken, defiant, loving – and who physically haunts and taunts him around the stage with a gymnastic fluidity. Their paranoid, nihilistic, almost stream-of-consciousness chatter jumps around in both chronology and location – from his flat to her funeral service and a wake that seems to take place in a casino – underscoring how oppressive and all-pervasive his state of self-loathing has become. His earnest younger brother (Richard James Clarke) provides glimpses of sanity and warmth, but the downward trajectory is inescapable.

This one-hour play is certainly bleak, but flashes of humour offer some much-needed relief. Props are minimal – a couple of stools, a few items of clothing hanging from a rail, two plates of food that have a grotesquely comic fate – but the stripped-back set is effective because most of the ‘action’ exists in the shadowy forms of memory or hallucination. It’s a play that mainly occurs within a fevered mind.

Within the small ‘Cage’ room at The Vaults, the actors have limited space to work in. But director Henry C. Krempels turns this limitation to the play’s advantage: the restricted floor area only serves to further highlight the characters’ sense of claustrophobia and imminent panic.

Bursts of menacing ambient sound are used creatively, with layers of distorted electronics accompanying moments of crisis or heightened awareness. This works well in that it’s hugely atmospheric, but there were points at which the noise was too loud and threatened to drown out the actors. That’s a shame because it is a play in which every word counts.

This one criticism aside, Blue Departed is a gripping and desperately sad study of pain, addiction and loss.

 

Reviewed by Stephen Fall

Photography by Lidia Crisafulli

 

Vault Festival 2019

Blue Departed

Part of VAULT Festival 2019

 

 

 

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