Opening new-kid-on-the-block Counterpoint’s 2013 season, BOX/ROLE/DREAM is a quietly raging mix of bared souls and subtlety.  

In BOX, Victor converses with an unseen (and possibly non-existent) cohabiter of a sauna. What starts as a friendly conversation u-turns into a frightening encounter visceratingly delivered by Jacob McDowell.

We enter the theatre, all hazer and shafty lights, and walk through the ubiquitous and minimal black blocks right through Victor’s personal space. No set dressing per se: the stripped architecture of the theatre walls are the backdrop, everything is laid bare. This metatheatrical intimate distance to the audience sticks a wonderfully fleshy human body right in front of our faces.

The great thing about this is that Victor totally ignores us and focuses in our middle distance as his internal rage builds, foments and bursts onto the unsuspecting other. We all feel happy not to be in his focus as his history turns him near psychopathic.

That he leaves little time to listen to replies from this ‘other’, that his outbursts are so threatening (I would surely have got my arse out of there early on), that the soundscape (excellently created by Emily Berryman) so evocatively ‘plunges’ me in the deep end of a pool, makes me feel this is an ongoing, repeated monologue Victor has with himself and that he is trapped into it. The box of the sauna, the box he refers to in the play (go see it to find out) are now a box he’ll never get out of.

Martyn Roberts provides a very bold statement with the lighting – shafts and directions that move as the ground shifts beneath us, keeping us unsteady. This does make the highlighting of the water bottle heavy handed and obvious, and doesn’t seem in keeping with such a well thought through piece. Newlands starts the night with a smack to the face.

ROLE is less successful. Again we have characters /actors who aren’t quite listening /reacting to each other /themselves but I’m not sure if this helps or hinders. It certainly supports Chanwai-Earle’s themes of shifting the point of view of our expectations and the characters’ creation of self-fiction to be able to hide from their pain, but sometimes it verges on pace not allowing actors to inhabit.

A night out for Denise (Dianne Pulham) goes fatally awry at a bar and we are presented with the dramatis personae of the event. Newlands gets the best work out of her actors in the monologues. Both Pulham and Sofie Welvaert (‘Tanya’) work hard but I think this subtle distancing isn’t helpful to them. With less shaping from Newlands, this piece feels rushed at times, leaving me with little connection or empathy for the characters so that when the inevitable end arrives the non-real aspect feels like non committal acting.

The soundscape and lighting are also more realistic than the other pieces, making it feel less ‘worked’ in the arc of the three pieces.

DREAM is the story of Parvee (Luke Agnew), a Czechoslovakian (‘not Russian!’) submerged submariner.  A brilliant start with the lighting utilises the existing architecture so well it feels a shame when Parvee is able to leave his confines and allowed the expansive use of the space.

Agnew accounts himself well here. Both director and actor take the time for pauses and feeling in between the lines, the silence of which allows the ever present ‘black water’ to haunt us, providing the most emotionally engaging work of teh evening.

Agnew and Newlands play the audience well, eliciting the ‘humour of the slavs’ (I cannot help but think Chanwai-Earle is homaging the ‘crazy Russian’ from “Armageddon”) but the creation of the environment through using actual set elements (our black boxes) and mimed obstacles is a little confusing. I’m not sure if it is a complete ‘set’ or differing areas nearby, and the mix of styles is not solid enough to indicate one way or the other. I find myself distracted from the narrative while I try to sort it out.

Parvee is extremely likable and those of us who remember the Kosmolets and the Kursk feel a stab of memory and foreboding. His valiant and doomed efforts to be ‘elsewhere’ are heart-rendering. Interesting that, in conversation with the older patrons, that memory made this piece more real than those situated closer to home.

Perhaps it is easier to identify with ‘at-arms-length’ stories than our own. This feels to be Newlands investigation in working with these pieces. The bareness of the stage, the boldness of the lighting, the pressing-in of the soundscape, the disconnect of the actors – these elements force us to confront a raw theatre and a rawness in ourselves.

This is a great start for Counterpoint Productions. The designers, director and actors deliver smart, thoughtful and a consistently good evening that is a ‘must see’. If only our more mainstream theatres had this passion for innovation. 

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