Vanishing Point’s productions are always different, from each other, as well as from your usual theatrical fare. The company brings two productions to this year’s International Festival which founder and director Matthew Lenton describes as ‘flip-sides of each other… The Destroyed Room is quite challenging and provocative whereas Interiors is much more benign.’ Not so. Interiors, that premiered in 2009 is, despite the humour, far more disturbing than benign.
Set in a northern country on the longest night of the year, the audience are voyeurs looking in through the stage-wide window at a dining room silently awaiting its dinner guests. An elderly man, smartly dressed but without his trousers, appears to mutter to himself as he wanders in and out of the room making small adjustments to the contents of the dinner table.
Granddaughter Ruby fiddles with her hair and make-up. With the wind whistling as the snow falls on the roof outside, Ruby’s continual hitching up of her incongruous strapless mini-dress makes physical the deep psychological need to keep the outside, real world away from the cosy façade created within. As if any of us can shut out life, ignore the reality that time ticks on towards our own death, no matter how cosy we might feel.
As the dinner guests arrive, bundled up in coats against the weather and carrying guns in case of polar bears, the audience can see but not hear. Aside from the wind that howls loudly each time the door is opened to admit another guest, and the compilation party CD that seeps through the walls, there is silence. At some point, once all the guests are safely ensconced, a disembodied voice begins to commentate on the interior – on the actions that can be seen inside the house and the unseen thoughts inside their heads.
A production of this sort not only requires the actors to develop new performance techniques, but also demands different attentive skills of the audience. Expecting the usual actor-audience connection, this disconcerting disconnect takes a little time to tune in to. Luckily, we are given some warm-up time as the action and narrative starts gently, demanding little, building to an almost frenzied climax that is perhaps epitomised by one drunken couple’s, brilliantly bizarre, choreographed routine to Video Killed the Radio Star. The party bubble bursts after this and the action subsides into gentle tranquillity once more as the guests, one by one, take their leave. However, not before our omniscient narrator informs us of how each one will meet their – mostly benign – end.
Vanishing Point has once again produced an unusual piece of theatre that is fascinating and absorbing while touching on something that is both universal and deeply felt.
Ran 6th – 8th Aug