Felix Barrett, Punchdrunk’s artistic
director and the co-creator of The
Third Day, had talked of breaking
television’s fourth wall. But the
infinitesimally slow pacing became the
equivalent of a test card. At least the
Facebook conversation about the
technical set-up was better than the
usual gossip one finds in a stalls bar.
(“I think that’s something called an
Argocat with a stabilised camera rig
in the front.”)
That we were witnessing some
bleak re-enactment of the story of the
Crucifixion with Law as a modern-day
Jesus was clear enough. But you
needed superhuman patience to stick
it out to the end.
Sometimes the blend of crowd
scenes and ritual resembled a cross
between Peter Hall’s film Akenfield
and Terence Davies’s The Long Day
Closes. With little in the way of
dialogue — menacing ambient music
dominated the soundtrack — we were
left groping in the darkness. The grim
British weather didn’t help.
Clive DavisTheatre
The Third Day: Autumn
Sky Arts
{((((
A
nd what was the low point
of a live broadcast —
part passion play,
part muddy
rave — thatlasted 12 hours, but
sometimes seemed
to drag on even
longer? There were
many contenders,
but nothing could
compete with the
sight of a bedraggled
Jude Law, right,
digging a grave for
about an hour. In real
time. Even Big Brother was
never as tedious as this.
“Slow TV” is the polite way of
describing an experimental folly from
Punchdrunk, that much-acclaimed
immersive theatre company. The
idea was to create a self-contained
narrative as part of The Third Day, the
Wicker Man-like drama series set on
Osea Island in Essex.
We knew that Law’s character, Sam,
was in a domain — accessible by
causeway — where pagan rites were
alive and well. What happened in
the hours that followed was
a matter of guesswork.
I kept myself sane by
following the chat on
Sky’s Facebook page.
The original plan
had been to ferry an
audience on to the
island to watch the
proceedings, but the
Covid pandemic put
paid to that. Instead
we watched at a safe
distance, courtesy of one
camera on a continuous take.
Kudos to the technicians, cast
and crew who negotiated what must
have been a phenomenally
complicated schedule.8 1GT Monday October 5 2020 | the times
arts
A powerhouse
partnership
Opera North and the Leeds Playhouse join forces
in a bold new programme, says Richard Morrison
Opera/Theatre
Connecting Voices
Leeds Playhouse
{{{{(
W
hat an imaginative
response this four-
show evening was
to the challenge
of restarting theperforming arts. Basically a
collaboration between two of Leeds’s
creative powerhouses — Opera North
and the Playhouse — it busted
boundaries, pooled resources and
meshed diverse talents. Definitely
worth the palaver of being asked to
enter and exit the Playhouse four
times in one evening, with everyone’s
temperature taken each time.
Two of the shows should have
been called “disconnected voices”.
Francis Poulenc’s one-woman opera
La voix humaine and Samuel Beckett’s
one-man play Krapp’s Last Tape were
written in the same year (1958), and
both involve protagonists bleakly
attempting to break through their
own isolation using technology.
What, sadly, could be more apt
for revival in 2020?
In Sameena Hussain’s Poulenc
production the woman, sung with
affecting pathos and superb diction by
Gillene Butterfield, struggles through
a fog of self-delusion until the
realisation finally sinks in that she has
been dumped by the fickle lover on
the other end of the phone. I loved the
use of phones from three different eras
to suggest that, whatever the century,
stories like this never change.
The man in Beckett’s semi-
autobiographical masterpiece has also
had his heart broken, but more by the
missed chances and false hopes that
he revisits here by playing a tape of
himself reminiscing 30 years earlier.
Directed by Dominic Hill, Niall Buggy
gives a grippingly angry, burnt-out
performance punctuated by mirthless
snorts of laughter at the vanity and
stupidity of his younger self, while
conveying the utter nihilism of
realising that you have sod all to show
for your three-score years and ten.
Mercifully, the evening’s other two
parts weren’t quite on this level of
misery, though, as the title suggests,
Matthew Eberhardt’s Reflections on La
voix humaine reworked the themes of
Poulenc’s opera as a bitter vignette
of a collapsing marriage. This was
mingled with Renaissance madrigals
and hauntingly beautiful Indian music
from the vocalist Keertan Kaur Rehal
and sitarist Jasdeep Singh Degun.
Overshadowing all, however,
was Orpheus in the Record Shop —
another reworking, this time weaving
strands of the Orpheus myth into
contemporary Leeds life. It was
primarily a showcase for theprotean talents of the rapper, writer,
composer and beatboxer Testament.
After a hesitant start he commanded
centre stage for over an hour with
a virtuoso display of wry humour
and freewheeling musical invention,
though towards the end of Aletta
Collins’s production he was joined
by members of Opera North’s
orchestra to build up a surprisingly
life-asserting finale.
Further performances at the
Playhouse each Friday and Saturday
to October 17 (0113 213 7700)Gillene Butterfield sang with affecting pathos in Poulenc’s La voix humaine