Tackling Truth & Taboo in The Nine O'Clock Slot

By EJ Martin

After seeing The Nine O'Clock Slot last night, I’m writing this from my local coffee shop. Normally, I write from home - I prefer the focus that solitude gives me, I'd rather lock myself in my little world with my thoughts and quietly appalling taste in music until the work is done. But for this, I had to come to the coffee shop, because they know me here. They know my name, they know what drink I favour, we see each other almost daily and have a shared currency of a few gentle jokes and pleasantries. It's an oasis in the hectic grey blur of my London life. I had to come here, because after The Nine O'Clock Slot last night, I couldn't bear to be alone today.

The Nine O'Clock Slot is the latest from Ice and Fire, and is written in response to the recent rise in the number of public health burials, which are perhaps better known as pauper's funerals. The most common time slot allocated for these services is 9am, the slot that no-one else wants, the "no-frills, low-grade, high-shame" slot, the slot at which the number of attendant mourners is often zero. It retraces the story of four individuals buried in a communal grave, using real names and real identities to travel to the margins of modern society and tell the stories behind those people who have been diminished to mere statistics.

The material for the piece was taken from two years' worth of research by the company into the rites, passages and rituals associated with dying, as well as extensive interviews with a wide spectrum of professionals whose job it is to work with aspect of the realities of death every day.

Ice and Fire have previously staged work that engages with such diverse issues as the experience of asylum seekers (Crocodile Seeking Refuge); the importance of independent investigative journalism (On The Record); and the 60th anniversary of the end of the British Mandate for Palestine (Welcome To Ramallah). The Nine O'Clock Slot is maybe their most universal piece to date, dealing as it does with the only experience that every single person in the room will be forced to confront eventually: their own mortality.

The first ten minutes do not prepare you for the searing emotional onslaught to come. The trendy foyer of the Red Gallery where we have all been milling about with our craft beer is invaded by an awkward funeral procession. Pallbearers struggle to make their way through the crowd while hipster audience members Instagram the coffin, which greatly diminishes the poignancy of this introductory image. When we reach the basement to our cabaret-style seats, this somewhat clumsy and mannered false start is quickly forgotten as we are plunged into myriad scenes from the lives of people that have dropped (or been kicked) out of society: down-out-out alcoholic Connor; his one-time associate Sarah, who only seems to have turned her life around; lonely Margaret, living inside her memories; Mr X, who has done everything he can to prevent be identified after he takes his own life under a commuter tube. Their encounters with the world and, occasionally, with one another, are heaped together as glittering fragments on a scrapheap. This, as the programme notes tell us, is a play of 'loose ends, partial perspectives, imperfect repetitions and journeys in the unknowable'.

For me, the least abstract of these fragments are the ones which are most touching. Two forensic pathologists playfully speculate as to the life of the mystery corpse on their gurney - what job he did, where he lived, what his favourite colour could have been. Hospice nurse Kay, at Connor's violent insistence, tells him, step by clinical step, exactly what will happen to his body when he dies. Kay and chaplain John break down to one another about the impossibility of preparing for another funeral to which no-one will come. These scenes are impeccably scripted, played with pitch-perfect naturalism, and completely devastating. Each character is richly drawn, their stories told with a grace and humour that restores their dignity to them even as we watch their darkest nights of the soul unravel. It is a very strong ensemble cast, with particularly standout performances from the remarkable Thusitha Jayasundera and Gary Cargill. Each key character performs a doom-laden blues number at some stage in proceedings, an odd device that leaves me slightly cold. However, the cumulative effect of all of these scenes as the play hurtles towards its inevitable conclusion is undeniable. The Nine O'Clock Slot is far greater than the sum of its parts.

This is not 'immersive theatre' as we understand it - after the initial kerfuffle, we spend the whole show in our seats watching the action play out with little or no input required from us, there are no alternative narrative strands or experiences available for the for the bold explorer. What it can be said to be it is completely engrossing, unflinchingly truthful, and powerful enough to move me to tears (more than once). It is an emotional juggernaut of a play about missed connections, aborted and futile attempts to save ourselves and each other, the magnetic forces at work in human nature that make us attract and repel in equal measure, and about what happens when you stop teetering on the brink and fall into the abyss. As Connor says: "We are living in a very narrow bandwith of safety, satisfaction, comfort and all that - it doesn't take much and the whole thing comes crashing down. Before you know it, you're a disgraceful fucking nobody".

The ticket for show is a stamp you get at the door, the tiny black outline of a clock face with the hands fixed at nine on the dot that is inked on to your skin of your hand, indelible for the next few days. This physical trace left on my body mirrors those seared into my brain by my experience at the Red Gallery - every time I catch sight of the clock on my hand, I am seized with the desire to reach out through the facelessness smog of urban living and make contact, real contact, with those around me. It sounds ridiculous and schmaltzy, I know, but I'm afraid it's true. Ice and Fire have produced a timely and timeless piece that speaks to anyone who has ever felt lonely or abandoned, been approached for help, offered or refused support. As I left, my head reeling, the security guard on the door to the venue was telling an inquisitive drunkard that the show was about death, which was "really important, because it happens, but nobody wants to talk about it, do they?" You should go and see The Nine O'Clock Slot, but don't go alone. Go with someone whose hand you can hold, who matters to you. Someone whose funeral you would be sure to attend.

@Emma_JaneMartin

LISTINGS DETAILS

Venue: The Red Gallery, 1-3 Rivington St, London EC2A 3DT.

Tel: 020 7613 3620

Dates + times: 26 Mar to 19 Apr 2014 at 7.30pm

Mon-Sat + 2.30pm on 29 Mar, and 5, 12 Apr

Box office: www.iceandfire.co.uk · 020 7613 749

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