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While plays by our beloved Bard are performed all over the world, Britain doesn’t quite return the love in welcoming international works to these shores. It’s refreshing then that the new Volta Festival is trying to make up for that, offering a chance to catch some exciting emerging names from Europe and America.
The two plays I saw (there are four in total), were wildly different to each other. First up was ‘Hamlet is Dead. No Gravity’ by Austria’s Ewald Palmetshofer, a postmodern riff on ‘Hamlet’ which unfolds obliquely until it finally paints a messy, Jackson Pollock-style portrait of a terribly fucked-up family.
The dialogue is hard to follow in ‘Hamlet is Dead...’ as snippets of sentences are repeated and the action is often broken by actors coming out of role and requesting a break. The cast of six play family and friends returned to childhood homes for a birthday and also a funeral, which prompts a drip-drip leakage of secrets. The events that happen are never concrete – everything merges with unreliable memories, while time jumps all over the place. And though the cast are very strong, the play doesn’t unfold as satisfyingly as it should. The final shocking event drifts out on the tide of inner-monologue babble, and you’re left wondering what all the fuss is about.
It’s a little easier to grasp what the hell is going on in the American Christopher Chen’s ‘Caught’, even if what’s real and what’s fiction is deliberately vague. To begin with we’re presented with a talk by a famous artist who describes how he was incarcerated in a Chinese prison. Then in a meeting with a journalist his entire story is exposed as fake. Then the play finishes and we have a talk after the play by the piece’s author, who proceeds to have an argument with one of the actors about who is appropriating whose story.
The layers continue to trick us until we’re left unsure whether the end of the play is really the end. ‘Caught’ is clever, but it repeats its point about how stories – and therefore our points of view – can be so easily manipulated, making for an uneven, varied double act. Though the plays aren’t masterworks, they are, at the very least, thought-provoking.