The Stage

Without Warning

Published Friday 3 February 2012 at 13:08 by Neil Norman

For an essay in disorientation, the vaulted labyrinth of The Old Vic Tunnels could hardly be a better choice of venue. Ushered into the damp dust miasma beneath Waterloo station, where sputtering neon and random pools of light struggle against the encroaching darkness, the audience is placed in an environment that approximates that of Brian Keenan, the man imprisoned for four and a half years by Islamic Jihad.

Inspired by the book of his experiences, An Evil Cradling, director Lizzi Kew Ross has fashioned a performance that explores the physical and psychological effects of a captivity that was designed to dislocate the mind of the imprisoned and alienate him from humanity. The effect, as revealed in a series of unseeing encounters, fragments of text and music, ended up achieving the opposite. As the performers reach out in their darkness and feel another body they become increasingly frantic for human physical communication, sometimes loving and tender, sometimes violent and alarming - fear and incapacity create sudden snatches of movement as a girl accelerates from a crawl to a scuttle around the floor in an attempt to escape a possible assailant. Occasionally, a trio of performers will pin a fourth against a wall like a crucified butterfly. Two cellists play in another part of the tunnels while a singer wails and keens a semi-spiritual lament. A brief spoken interlude between a man who either cannot speak English or has lost the power of speech and another who delivers a banal aria on the absence of kitchens in new build houses offers an extraordinary insight into the comforting caprices of the mind trapped in such horrific circumstances.

Forged out of a series of trust games by the performers, this is an urgent, disturbing and ultimately humane work that leaves a haunting and indelible impression.