House on the Edge (Ipswich, DanceHouse)
Anyone who lives
anywhere near the East Anglian coast – or indeed further north
right up to Yorkshire – knows how much of it is lost to the North
Sea every year. Not just individual houses but whole villages have
been devoured over the centuries by the waves when storms rage.
That’s the situation in which the characters created by writer Anna
Selby and director-choreographer Heather Eddington find themselves
in State of Flux’s new collaborative dance drama.
with a marvellous design of a corner-poised house facade with eroding
foreground floor by Sarah Beaton set off by Magali Charrier‘s sky
and sea animations and the atmospheric score by Matt Hodges. Ann
Dickie is the woman who now feels marooned in the seaside home which
was once a love-nest created for her by her man (husband? lover?)
(Nicholas Minns) and now threatens to become a death-trap.
Narrator Pradeep Jay
also plays well-meaning officialdom concerned to rescue and rehouse
the couple an an altogether more sinister visitor from the man’s
past. There are many ways in which to escape from external pressures,
and leaving it up to nature is just one option. In between the spoken
passages Dickie and Minns circle each other, share moments of
remembered pleasure and divide on the issue of their future.
It would be good to see
an after-life for this piece; it’s a great deal better than some of
the works-in-progress which litter the fringe festival circuit
between now and Edinburgh. With a running time of just under an hour,
it has such a strong visual and audio impact that it’s difficult to
think of something with which it might be paired. But that’s a
problem for theatre programmers, not for their audiences.
