It feels like a lifetime ago that I watched this show. Since I saw it, and it subsequently closed, I have also closed a show, and in the intervening weeks, the world has quite literally turned upside down. Moments of the show stick with me in these troubling times. Lights tight on the face of a dying character, while we hear shouts and panic all around, forced to only look at the face of this man suffering. Compelling stuff in this moment.
Jamie Lloyd directs this delightfully physical interpretation, with a new script by Martin Crimp, which focuses on the language. Words are swords, words are strength. Words are shields, and they reveal us. The heightened language of the original is re-positioned as spoken word poetry, at times hip hop, with beat boxing on stage, and choreographed fights that verge into Jerome Robbins style dance fighting. The cast move as a unit through the beautiful and simple design, where sound and light are the true forces of storytelling in a way they only can possibly be in the theatre.
This is deeply theatrical work. Moments of tension, seeing others, forced to reckon with their physical presence as we hear characters talk about them. Moments of reflection, literal and psychological. Moments of tight focus, and moments of huge expanse.
James McAvoy is electric in this production. He embodies strength and vulnerability simultaneously, on the razor’s edge of desperate masculinity and intellectual strength. The cast as a whole are fantastic, but it is McAvoy’s magnetism that pulls us through. The fragility of his masculine edge, as he suppresses his intellectual tendencies is truly heartbreaking to watch - as we see his love for Roxanne manifest itself in his inability to express it to her.