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Static

Published Monday 25 February 2008 at 13:00 by Thom Dibdin

Overlapping speech with sign language, audio interpretation and written surtitles, Suspect Culture take their trademark use of fractured time and, in this co-production with Graeae, apply it to language.

The result is a somewhat confusing piece of theatre about a widow trying to find meaning in a compilation tape her husband Chris, a music journalist made deaf in an accident, has left for her.

The difficulty is that Dan Rebellato’s script works better on the page and intellectually than in performance. Less because of presentational difficulties, partly because the music referenced and played throughout is so specifically muso-orientated, but mainly because appreciation of said music, and the application of the qualities given to it, are matters of taste.

Pauline Lockhart uses the script most successfully as Sarah, the widow who never learned to sign. Jeni Draper is excellent as the grieving sister, Julia, but doesn’t find enough depth to explain her pre-occupations with God and hate of her sister-in-law. Tom Thomasson is similarly solid but without real motivation as the couple’s best friend - who had been collaborating with Chris in a web-site reviewing wish-list gigs that never happened.

Most hampered is Steven Webb, as Chris. His constant presence on Ian Scott’s clear and minimal set, unseen by the other characters and mute but able to sign, is more nebulous wandering than anything purposeful. Similarly, the play swithers between looking at loss, deafness as a metaphor for death, and music as a metaphor for life, ending up saying not much about any of them. Technically interesting, particularly for its use of movement, but flawed.

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