The Events a production of the British Actors
Touring Company is
one of those theatre pieces whose ability to affect you comes down to personal
sensibility, not only because of its subject matter but because its mode of
presentation involves community participation. The story takes its inspiration
from Anders Breivik’s massacre of 77 young people at a youth camp on Utøya
Island, Some of whom—the program notes are sketchy here—may have
been part of a community choir run by a female vicar with whom the creators met
while doing their research.
The
play, or as identified perhaps more accurately, the text created by David
Greig, tells, in mostly remembered
testimony (no gunfire, melodrama or blood), the story of a day when a terrorist
walked into a choir rehearsal with a gun and randomly blew away many of its
members…whose hostilities were ended by the intervention of the
vicar-choirmaster with an act of remarkable bravery and even more remarkable
tenderness.
The
production, helmed by Ramin Gray,
employs only two professional actors and a pianist. In the current company (the
play has been performed worldwide with at least one other cast, so a web-search
reveals) Neve McIntosh (Madame
Vastra, to you Doctor Who fans) is the vicar and Clifford
Samuel the terrorist (and others); they
step in an out of character, alternately playing scenes and providing
documentary-like continuity…of sorts.
And
there’s a third participant: a local community choir, and not the same one at
each performance. They’re managed by the third member of the company, pianist
and musical director Magnus Gilljam. In
what must be a very deftly organized and well-codified process, they’re
rehearsed in a number of songs, assigned minimal text (to be read, not
memorized) and drilled in minimal staging. The point being, I suppose, to add
the poignancy of real civilians; to make it impossible to dismiss the honor and
fragility of innocents in the cross-hairs. And etcetera.
Again,
what this would all mean to you isn’t really for a critic to guess at or
attempt to assess. Personally, to be unflinchingly candid, I found The
Events to be intriguing for the first 10-15
minutes or so and thereafter rather dull. Once the game plan was defined, it
held no suspense or revelation for me. The general audience reaction seemed
respectful but subdued, and not, I’d wager, because the subject matter and
treatment were too sobering or disquieting for an unequivocal burst of approval
at the finish. But then, when The Events concludes its engagement at NYTW, it will have racked up a history of
over 200 performances; and what it may have meant to that group of people on
that night in NYC (let alone to me) may be quite different on another night, or
in another place, to an audience who may have its own cultural or personal
reasons for feeling it more keenly.
The
best I can do is accord it a noble try at something different, in the service
of making controlled, artistic sense out of something randomly, artlessly
senseless…and leave the final verdict to you.
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