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What is a vessel? It can mean a ship, a curved container used to hold liquid, or a person who is used for a particular purpose. We might say, for example, “These four performers are the vessels of writer Sue MacLaine’s ambition.” ‘vessel’ presumably takes its name from the last definition, although the words poured through the four performers may as well all be ships in the night.
So what is ‘vessel’? A kind interpretation would be that it is an hour-long meditation on our culture’s status quo – sexist, racist, ableist, ageist, economically unequal – using individual words or statements as starting points, painting flat pictures of a grotesquely unfair world in the muted colours of four overlapping voices and a projected overhead script. It forms a sort of tonal picture of disparity, want and cruelty, and ends with polyphonic defiance.
A less kind interpretation would be that ‘vessel’ is a little like sitting through an hour-long reading of a thesaurus, and that its script, for want of a better word, reads like a check point of basic left wing concerns that are never expanded upon, merely given collective piles of concrete nouns. “Let’s talk about capital,” a section might begin, before the four performers begin to list, “investment, profit, hedge funds, mortgages, bankruptcy, exploitation, cash, cashflow, banking,” on and on for about five minutes. (This section doesn’t actually exist, but the cultural critique doesn’t get more sophisticated than this.) There is nothing in ‘vessel’ that an audience can connect with emotionally, no sense of human story or soul behind the endless lists of injustices.
A much less kind interpretation would be that ‘vessel’ is desperately tedious virtue-signalling with no passion or indeed content whatsoever.
It is stylish to look at. Holly Murray’s costume design has the performers in soothing green and blue robes, each slightly different, appearing to be the uniforms of secret religious orders. They each have a different style of chair and a different coloured water bottle, though the water bottle colours don’t match the robes. This is the sort of thing you notice when you’re watching the performance of a sort of woke dictionary. There’s not a lot else to capture the attention.