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Theatre 503 presents
A review by Alice MacKenzie for EXTRA! EXTRA!
If children are the symbol of the future, what does it mean if parents start to kill their own young? The Lifesavers takes place in Britain a generation from now in a time where children are raised by the state to protect them from their parents. Cycles of violence and abuse have been extinguished by the merciless killing of all who abuse,, all who are abused, and all who witness. No mind that is directly scarred is allowed to grow for fear that it will live to inflict fresh scars. Seams of violence have been ripped out. The Lifesavers are the exception: it is they who made the decision to deliver society from what they saw as an epidemic of Baby P's, stabbings, and basements and they who now hold a tight rein on society to stop it slipping back. Keith Bartlett gives a strong and suitably apocolypticly grave turn as The Senator: weighty enough to be the voice of history in the plays opening monologue, and human enough to throw notes of philosophical ambiguity and hope into an otherwise bleak play. The tense, doom laden atmosphere is helped by a simple but effective trio of sets (Helen Goddard), sound (Richard Hammarton) and light (Emma Chapman) that transform the whole of the small space and help to suck the audience into this other world. Into this world step a couple, Cathy and Robert, who are old enough to have links back into the old order and to remember what it was to be raised by parents. Cathy, played by Gina Isaac, is desperate to raise her own child and it is this that sets into motion the plays struggles and questioning. If you divorce a human being from nature do they continue to be a human being? Cathy plays a woman on the point of hysteria that bubbles up from her regularly throughout the play. She feels a very powerful biological need to raise and nurture her own child and cannot be satisfied with anything else almost to the point of cruelty. At one point Cathy discusses with The Senator if the horse on their farm feels any less a horse for not being as necessary to the working of the farm as he once was. She answers that the horse is still a horse. But then Cathy is not content as a woman if she cannot raise her own child. This level of desperate need and fearlessness of the consequences is necessary to push the events of the play forward, but feels odd, as though she is left to represent everything 'female'. Cathy has a highly developed sense of intuition and at one point in the play uses it to understand all that another character cannot say without words. This character is Jack, one of 'The Silent Ones'. Some of the children born after The Terror and who were taken directly from their mothers in to care at birth neither speak nor hear. Although they didn’t experience any of The Terror directly, It’s as though their symptoms are a response to the collective trauma and struggles from society - a kind of hysteria in the old, 19th century meaning of the word. A young Rupert Simonian plays Jack and comes across well as a boy who communicates with his body and not his words. He forms a strong bond with Cathy and it is his coming to live with the couple that then reveals much about the other characters in the play. Although I really do believe that a person can communicate a great deal without words, especially in times of heightened emotion, the moment of mind to mind detail that the boy and woman share seems to go beyond that. As female powers and gut feelings go, telepathy felt like an odd choice in a play routed clearly in a gritty realism in most other ways. Can people change or are we locked into cycles of trauma and abuse from which there is no hope of escape? Robert, played by a frowning Laurence Mitchell, provides a character whose father had killed his mother and brothers, and whose wife killed their children during the madness of the terror. How damaged is he? The audience never really knows. Unusually for a dystopian play, it wasn't entirely clear what playwright Fraser Grace wanted to tell us in reply to those questions. Or maybe I just didn’t understand the end properly... The end happened in a rapid whirl of images and words that couldn’t quite be said, and when they were, were articulated so fast and emotionally that I was dazed. So if you see it, pay close attention to the last five minutes. Frustratingly it felt as though these moments held the key to the play. The play was a gripping and tense futuristic nightmare that acted as a warning to us and our social maladies without really passing a clear judgement on what we should learn from this possible future. Strong performances from Keith Bartlett and Rupert Simonian, as well as an effective score kept the audience on edge up to the end. A few choices of delivery left me feeling slightly unsatisfied, and with an impression that what I was taking away was a feeling of doom but also some interesting questions.
Box Office: 020 7978 7040 Theatre website: www.theatre503.com Tickets: £13/£8 concessions, Tuesdays 'pay-what-you-can' Theatre: Theatre 503, The Latchmere Pub, 503 Battersea Park Rd, London SW 11 3BW
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ary Couzens