The Stage

Daniel Hit by a Train

Published Thursday 4 March 2010 at 11:35 by Natasha Tripney

Part of Lone Twin’s Catastrophe Trilogy, this intriguing and sometimes frustrating piece takes its inspiration from the Watts Memorial in Postman’s Park, a series of plaques commemorating people who died while saving, or at least trying to save, others.

A scene from Daniel Hit by a Train at Barbican Pit Photo: Francis Loney

There are 53 separate stories to tell and the piece takes the form of a macabre countdown. Performed on a bare red stage, the only prop being a huge bass drum, each tale is stripped down to its barest details. The accounts are purposefully drained of any real emotion and told in the flattest manner possible.

There is considerable repetition. Again and again people have fatal encounters with trains, fires and rivers. The phrase “ran into the burning house” recurs so often that it starts to lose any real meaning, to sound faintly absurd. The cast make use of elements of music hall and circus to further muddy things. They sing small ditties and perform little skits, each punctuated by the jarring thunder of the drum.

The Victorian taste for sentimentality and sensation is used as a neat counterpoint to our own attitude to such things, and the piece does succeed in making one think about what constitutes an act of bravery or heroism, but there is an intentionally unrelenting quality in the telling of these tales that at times feels overdone. The chosen tone, which sits midway between ironic distance and something more inquiring, can be as irritating as it is distinctive.