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Review: The Dying Of Today @ The Other Room, Porter's

Postiwyd gan Tom_Bevan o Caerdydd - Cyhoeddwyd ar 31/03/2015 am 11:28
2 sylwadau » - Tagiwyd fel Llwyfan

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Friday 27th March 2015

"I called it a disaster... I gave it a name!"

A man walks into a barber shop with, as he so vividly announces, some very bad news... Yes, this may sound like the beginning of a particularly well-expressed joke but is in fact the premise of the latest production to be held at The Other Room pub theatre, The Dying Of Today.

The second play in the Life in Close Up season at Cardiff's freshest performance space offers the audience a curious ride through the revealing and receiving of a worst case scenario, war time disaster - and will be one of the most intense shows you'll see this year.

Sweep aside the velvet red curtains on the far side of Porter's bar and you'll find The Other Room, the compact new performance space for a capital city craving more fringe and cutting edge theatre. The venue is the perfect fit for the ambitious punch of this two man, one act play, written by Howard Barker in 2008 and finding its roots in Thucydides' ground-breaking description of the monumental defeat of the navy and the Athenian army during the Peloponnesian War.

The latter text, arguably one of the earliest attempts to objectively record an event of historical gravitas, describes a destruction "so complete not being thought credible" which was rumoured to have been described by a foreigner, mid-shave, to his disbelieving Athens barber. What we witness is Barker's recreation of this exchange sometime, it seems, in the early 20th century with a key twist; the bearer of bad news soon becomes the barber himself as the evocative ramblings of a customer soon become his own horrific version of events. The heady spectrum of fiction, suggestion, fact and reaction is emotively crossed in a short but powerful performance.

The barber shop is brilliantly brought to life in the space by artistic director Kate Wasserberg; the attention to detail in the design of the neat and charming neighbourhood barbers - until its proprietor's raged outburst - is a familiar backdrop and the audience quickly becomes the hairdresser's mirror; the noise of Porter's next door offering the nearby bustle of the port town outside. The unusual exchange of frantic, witty and poignant dialogue plays out across marvellous shifts in power between the two characters, handled with ease by the consistently impressive performances of Leander Deeny, as the smartly dressed and often painfully articulate customer, and Christian Patterson, the emotionally intriguing barber. The pair navigate the erratically poetic terrain of Barker's script with laudable finesse and effectively utilise the small stage.

As a text, the play has been criticised for lacking emotional depth and the brief time in which we have to know the characters is perhaps frustrating. However, this performance intensely reflects the impersonal nature of grief in a soon to be rationalised and objectively described human catastrophe; indeed, the barber recognises that his mourning will be lost as part of a wider, collective pill of defeat swallowed by a nation. And it is in this realisation, in part, that the tragic genius of this play hits hard; The Dying Of Today is a charged, stimulating and philosophical piece of theatre that will leave you gasping for breath and scratching your head.

Overall Rating: 4/5

The Dying Of Today runs at The Other Room in Porter's until April 11th. For tickets click here.

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