Reviews

The Possibilities

| Off-West End |

7 November 2011

The Tristan Bates theatre makes a stab at staging Howard Barker’s 1986 narrative on oppression, which is made up of ten short plays, each one depicting a different time frame and culture. The range goes all the way from biblical Judith rejecting her heroic identity to a futuristic society with an obtuse disapproval of sexuality.

The Possibilities aims to collate a cacophony of examples that conduct us through the arena of human oppression with a careful blend of violence and pathos. In practice, however, what we see is a somewhat disconnected string of rather bluntly written situations.

Much of the acting verges on the cartoonish, making it hard to engage with the real brutality of the subject. This is not entirely the fault of the production – Barker’s work fails to puncture the surface of the issue and leaves little opportunity for the cast to illuminate the depths you might hope to see.

This said, Mathew Parker’s direction results in a fluidly choreographed performance. The cast of nine, recent graduates from Drama Studio London, create characters that blend and flow across the stage, and, so far as this goes, the drama moves smoothly from one scene to the next. There is some injection of humour, and some discomfort – a naked king lamenting the death of his soldiers goes some way to achieving its attempt to disturb.

– Jessica Frith