Show 6, Summerhall

By Briony Rawle

Show 6 is the latest of the Lyric Hammersmith’s ‘Secret Theatre’ series of plays, details of which are revealed only to those who actually buy their way past the impassive box office gatekeepers and are installed in a theatre seat as the lights go down. And, of course, all the mates of those who have seen it and are unable to keep it secret. This reviewer will attempt to uphold the sacred mystery of Secret Theatre by being oddly cryptic about reviewing it.

One thing I can reveal is that the script is by Mark Ravenhill, who adopts a strange, dangling lexicon for his characters, composed entirely of unfinished sentences and syntactic knots. Some sentences will trail off into nothing, while others are chopped into by another character before reaching their end, while others will be grammatically unfinished but with the intonation of a complete sentence. While this may sound like a giant verbal headache, the effect is actually extremely accomplished, as if Ravenhill has invented his own New Speak, and the audience leaves the show fighting the urge to speak in the same way.

The characters’ use of this language is interestingly eloquent, in that it gives an impression of repression, fracture, and stuntedness that echoes the events of the plot. The characters are fighting to remember the time before an enormous schism occurred in their lives, and their shallowness, coupled with their half-speak dialogue, appropriately shows them up as incomplete beings.

Sadly, though, the performances themselves don’t quite hit home. While the language allows for moments of interesting realism in the characters’ speech patterns, for the most part they feel very separate from each other, and there are many points at which revelations don’t seem to hit the characters as hard as they should. Different characters played by the same actor are not very carefully delineated, physically or vocally, and the relationships between characters are uncertain and underdrawn.

Perhaps the show is tethered by its hour-long time slot, but it seems to need a lot more space. Although the theme of incompleteness gives it an interesting edge, the show actually feels stunted as a whole, missing a little heart and humanity. Having said that, it’s an engaging piece, well worth seeing; challenging and thought-provoking, with interesting things to say about the way that we write our own histories and are fractured by our traumas. Still trying to work out the reason for the female characters being in swimming costumes throughout, though. Perhaps that’s a secret too.

★★★

Show 6: Lyric Hammersmith Secret Theatre #SecretTheatre

3.50pm, Summerhall @ Roundabout (Venue 26) 1 hour

16th, 17th August

@PostScriptJour

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