Theatre

Filter Theatre, best known for ‘Faster’ and its radical approach to the ‘Caucasian Chalk Circle’, is a lively company, only six years old and full of promise. Oliver Dimsdale, Ferdy Roberts and Tim Phillips turn sound into scenery, with every plip, plink and plop created visibly by the performers and technicians onstage. In this new piece, created with director and playwright David Farr, they remind us how high-tech our world has become, but  – because there are no illusions and we see how the sounds and visuals are created –  the evening is very theatrical.

With a name like Filter, they had to get round to the subject of water eventually. It is also, in the words of one of the characters, a professor of environmental sciences, ‘a sociable molecule that loves to mingle’. And according to this piece mingling is what we should do if we want to have satisfactory relationships and save the planet. The mysteries and importance of water and of our relationship to it are explored in two interwoven stories. On the one hand Graham, a depressed environmental officer, travels to Vancouver for the funeral of his father, the professor.

There he meets his half brother, whose perception of their father seems very different from his own. On the other, Claire (played rather too judgmentally by Victoria Moseley) is an apparatchik of the Blair Government who is involved in frustrating negotiations with the Americans on climate change, a subject to which she is so dedicated that her relationship with a diver who is about to dive deeper than anyone has been before, falls by the wayside. Both stories are intriguing and told with great fluency and clarity. With a little more fizz in the writing, the production would be even better.