Theatre and book reviews by Janice Dempsey

'Grounded' in Cranleigh - a review

25/11/2014

I had never been to Cranleigh Arts Centre's theatre before when I was asked to review this one-woman play on 20th November. It's an excellent small auditorium. We were kept on the edge of its comfortable seats for sixty-five minutes of thought-provoking drama that night.

In the darkened auditorium the audience faces a cloudy green illuminated cube Inside the cube, an androgynous crop-haired figure stands assertively in pilot’s uniform. Piercing frenetic rock music is playing at full volume.

In the next hour we come to understand this enclosed space as cockpit, home, office space, cell, fish tank, its thinly veiled facets are mirror, screen, camera lens, spy hole. But when the play begins white light reveals a crop-haired fighter-pilot in love with blue sky and physical action.

We are not just audience, but witnesses. As we watch the Major developing into a troubled self-reflective human being, we see that this is more than a tale of a woman struggling with the conflicting needs of her ambition and her equally strong need for emotional relationships with her husband and daughter.

George Brant’s play confronts questions about surveillance in modern life as well as in modern warfare. We think about the cost to the surveyors and the surveyed. Unmanned “drones” against distant human targets have changed the nature of war. The operators of these killing machines lead the safe humdrum lives of office-workers. As the Major points out, the Odyssey would have been a very different story if Odysseus had returned to his family every night.

This is an extraordinary tour de force by Lucy Ellinson. Her interpretation of the Major is never static: she constantly reveals new moods, nuances of feeling, conjures up the figures of her colleagues, husband and child. She holds the audience in thrall from the moment her glittering eyes meet theirs. We travel vicariously through her kaleidoscope of emotions: joy, pride, sensual excitement, affection, shame, guilt, protectiveness, fury, frustration, pity and helplessness. She moves in a dance of expressive stances, fully engrossed and engrossing.

The technical production is perfect. The muffled explosive sounds of distant death-strikes, subtle background environmental sounds, synchronised with lighting that marks transitions and emotional high points, are an integral part of this powerful production.

This is an important play for our time, about gender expectations but even more about the alienation of human action and feeling from its physical consequences. All kinds of screens are major players here, as in our real lives today.

If you can catch this remarkable play on its tour of the southeast, I’d strongly advise you to do so. The Gate Theatre's tour of the south east has two more dates left - Colchester Arts Centre tonight 26th November (01206 500900) and Oxford on 29th November (The North Wall 01865 319450). Their website is at http://www.gatetheatre.co.uk

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Halloween in Paris? The Catacombs, of course!

5/11/2014

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Under the city of Paris, as in many other cities, is a huge winding system of tunnels, alleys and byways, and a whole population of the dead. On our five-day city-break last week, we decided to brave the three-hour queue to go in. Only two hundred people are allowed in at any one time, so the queue moves very slowly. Luckily we found ourselves in the line beside a delightful couple, (who laughed at all our jokes!) and the time went, if not quickly, in a pleasant way as we got to know each other.

I had a little sketch book with me and drew Dónall and a bit of the queue, to help pass the time.

The public tour takes about 45 minutes and you can hire an audio-guide. We didn't.

Paris's past is commemorated in its Catacombs as in the art galleries, statuary monuments and museums above ground. There are five storeys and 200 kilometres of tunnels, most closed to the public for obvious reasons. Google "Paris Catacombs stories" and you can read about some of them, in true and fictional tales.

In 1785, the overflowing populations of churchyards and monasteries and the huge cemeteries of Pére Lachaise, Montmartre and Montparnasse forced the city to begin to disinter and relocate the remains of their citizens from the ossuaries where they had been stored after the churchyards were full. The Revolution in 1788-1793 brought huge numbers of new corpses for disposal and a section of the catacombs is devoted just to those turbulent years of riots and mass executions and assassinations.

The last bones were stacked in the tunnels in 1859, by which time more care was being taken to show respect for these anonymous remains of Paris's citizens.

Inscriptions with quotations from the Bible and from poets (Desmartine, Dante and others) are in most of the tunnels, where the first consignments, from the churchyard of Les Innocents, had been unceremoniously dumped in 1785 and during the violent French Revolution years. Somewhere among these skulls and femurs are the leaders of the Revolution, Danton, Camille Desmoulins and Robespierre, who finally fell victims to it. Having just read Hilary Mantel's "A Place of Greater Safety" we felt very moved by the thought.

Oddly, we didn't find it very spooky to be surrounded by memento mori like this. After the first few tunnels, these stacks of skulls became curiosities, the most moving aspect of them how small and vulnerable our heads look, when flesh and jaw have gone and our differences are almost (but not quite) erased.

We didn't regret the time we queued. You have to see this once, we agreed.

The catacombs of Paris were founded in the quarries worked for centuries for building materials and limestone. The quarries fell into disuse and needed work to strengthen the roofs and prevent subsidence. They're very deep, the first gallery reached down 177 narrow spiral steps. If there was subsidence in a tunnel, a "bucket dome" would form, progressively piling rock above the point of the original fall until the surface at the top collapsed. There's a preserved example of a one of these, repaired, near the bottom of the 85 step exit staircase. Looking up at it makes rather a beautiful photo but was catastrophic in the street above. The white monument in the centre of the round chamber commemorates those who died in the subsidence.

The two relief sculptures below are by Décure, one of the first workers employed by the Quarry Inspectors. They are of a palace in his home city, Port Mahon in Menorca. He made them between 1777 and 1782, from memory: before coming to Paris he had been imprisoned in a gaol opposite the palace. He died in a rock-fall, not long after making them.