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The Dying of Today
Until Nov 22 2008
This event has finished
Arcola Theatre, 27 Arcola St, London, E8 2DJ
Rating:
By Caroline McGinn

Posted: Mon Oct 27 2008
‘Do you like bad news?’ asks the deliciously malicious Visitor (Duncan Bell), squirming with pleasure under a red light in his barber’s chair. ‘I do.’ So does playwright Howard Barker: 29 examples of his own-brand theatre of catastrophe have been produced by bespoke Barker company The Wrestling School in the past three decades, and this new two-hander, like many of its predecessors, is a sophisticated exercise in high-concept bloodless carnage.

Barker’s scenes often come over as semi-Socratic dialogues with a twist of cruel sexual sophistication. Here, the source and structure match the style – the dialogue between the Visitor and the Barber he torments (George Irving) is inspired by Thucydides’s account of the total loss of the Athenian army and navy. This very bad news arrived unofficially in Piraeus via a visitor who was being shaved. Barker turns the scenario into a cat-and-mouse game where the diabolically long-winded Visitor prolongs the Barber’s agony and his own enjoyment for as long as possible.

Duncan Bell as the Visitor prowls, shirtless, through Barker’s exquisite cruelties with lashings of the only appropriate emotion. There is a danger, though, that a play which is so exclusively fascinated with vanity and cruelty can itself appear narcissistic and sadistic. The sense of a cold intelligence at work is striking, but surely there is more to tragedy than well-mannered torture.

Director Gerrard McArthur helps the actors make the most of the few opportunities for crisis in the script (when the barber realises his son is dead; when he smashes his shop; and when the horrified moans of the populace begin to waft through his broken windows). Barker’s analysis of destruction is occasionally dazzling. But this structure – where the telling of a dreadful tale is stretched out over 70 artificially self-conscious minutes – also stretches the audience on the rack without ever making them feel real pain.

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2 comments

Posted by chrisine rodgers on 30 Oct 2008 14:15
I sat through the 70 minutes of brilliant dialogue enthralled by the performances of Duncan Bell and George Bailey and feeling the pain of human suffering across more than two thousand years.
I saw it last Friday and it is still vivid in my mind. The staging is great. Go and see it.

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Posted by gerrard mc arthur on 30 Oct 2008 01:58
this reviewer's last comment is absolute nonsense

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