Briefing April 13, 2008
Posted by cathrynsymons in : Camden, Reviews , trackbackI’m ashamed to say that, despite being in this area for nearly a decade, yesterday was my first trip to the Camden People’s Theatre. I nearly didn’t make it. From the outside, it is a small and uninspiring venue in the unlovely urban desert between Drummond St and Tottenham Court Rd and when I finally ventured in last week to book tickets I was told that the opening night for their latest production had been flooded out, and that tickets have to be bought through the internet.
I’m glad I persevered. Mercurial Production’s short play, Briefing, is an hour very well spent. The play is based on Doris Lessing’s 1971 novel “Briefing for a Descent into Hell”, the story of a man who loses his memory and is admitted to a psychiatric hospital as the Patient. He may be mad, or he may be an agent of an interplanetary civilisation trying to rescue the Earth from humanity’s excesses. He cannot remember his former earthly life, as a Cambridge classics professor, but remembers snatches of his other experiences and has a strong sense of having forgotten something important. The book can be read as a psycho-drama, or as science fiction. I’m inclined to that latter, because it pivots around the scene of the ‘Briefing’ of the title, where the assembled alien agents are told that their mission to earth will be difficult, and that they will forget who they were. This scene doesn’t enter the consciousness of the Patient at any stage, and seems too concrete if the author is trying to keep the nature of this reality open.
The play is true to the novel, drawing the dialogue from it. The cast enter the small, sparse performance space down the side aisle with no separate stage. Most of the action takes place on and around a hospital bed, which becomes a raft in the ocean, and, with the cast, a cliff-face climbed by the Patient.
Where much of the book is unremitting stream-of-consciousness prose as the Patient talks through his memories, the cast use movement and words to take us through the story. First supporting his perhaps fantastical reality, then transforming into the hospital staff trying to ‘cure’ him, they bring the confusion between the two worlds to life.
As with the book, the play comes through on multiple levels. It is commentary on the way we treat the mentally-ill, with the Patient continuously drugged and under threat of electric shock therapy, and the medical staff’s certainty that their own reality is true. And is there madness too in the dire state of the planet, so much worse now than when the book was first written?
This is Mercurial Productions first production, bringing together young actors who are all graduates of the Parisian theatre school, Ecole Jacques Lecoq. James Turpin is excellent as the Patient, somnolent and confused, but calm so that the possibility that the past he partly remembers is the real one always remains open. The ensemble work together seamlessly, at times almost dancing their way through the play.
Briefing plays at the Camden People’s Theatre until 26 April. Tickets are £10/£12, and bookings must be made through Ticketweb who will add a pound or two to the price.
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