Review: Hurts Given And Received, Riverside Studios

I’ll refrain from a tangent on voting Liberal Democrat this coming election, but I have always had a shameless leftist tendency to favour underdogs and outsiders. And they don’t come much more outsider than Howard Barker, one of the most significant British playwrights … who has never had a production staged at our National Theatre. A case in point: the Wrestling School. Refused a relatively small sum of funding by the Arts Council, rescued by an anonymous US donor, before celebrating its 21st birthday, it has been a turbulent couple of years for the production company dedicated to staging his works.

Ironically then, the ‘relevance’ of the first of Barker’s new plays at the Riverside Studios, Hurts Given And Received, seems obvious at a first glance: railing poet desperately seeks others’ suffering for magnum opus only to discover that his own sacrifice is demanded in order to communicate with the masses. It’s easy to see why one might be tempted to follow the siren song of allegorical interpretation and read something of Barker’s own experiences into it. The deceptively simple structure of consecutive visitations by various friends certainly encourages this.

But it’s too simple. Bach is by no means ‘Bach-er’. In spite of all his vitriol and sadism, Tom Riley’s Bach is much more charismatic than one suspects Barker might be. Surprisingly, for someone who criticised comedy’s banality in Arguments For A Theatre, despairing at the mass response it provokes, Barker’s script is laced with humour. The scene in which Jane Bertish’s police detective September unwittingly calls his “contemporaneity” into question by dismissing his outdated metaphors drives Bach to apoplexy, and the audience to laughter. Riley occupies the role with great vocal and physical presence, to such an extent that when he is absent from the the final half hour, the loss is truly felt. Although this might also be due to the fact that the optimistic 90 minutes running time came closer to 2 hours without an interval, with a couple of parts here and there that felt like they could have been trimmed.

Issy Brazier-Jones gives a worryingly good performance as the schoolgirl Sadovee, shifting the night’s initial light tone to something altogether darker. Tomas Leipzig’s staging aids this more ominous mood with an oversized scribe’s desk and chair that simultaneously suggest the weight of the responsibility and the frailty of those who pick up the pen.

This is a complex, layered piece of theatre that flirts with meaning, hinting at an overarching narrative into which all the pieces can be placed, but which always shifts out of vision. It’s not unlike the Old Sheep Shop in Alice In Wonderland in that regard (bear with me here): looking round, everything seems in place, but selecting any one aspect for special focus causes it to become insubstantial. One almost imagines Barker gleefully penning his flight into the imagination before disguising it in trappings that suggest, but never establish, a wider socio-political context.

Hurts Given And Received is an essay on poetry that manages to be at once manifesto and satire. But more than that, it is poetry itself, and a stunning example at that.


Tickets:
£15, unassigned seating. Unassigned seating is something of a mixed blessing for the theatregoer on a shoestring. On the one hand, if you're eager and arrive early enough, you can have your pick of seats. On the other, there are times when you'd really rather just know that you're going to be able to find seats together regardless of where they are (Southwark Playhouse, I'm looking at you). Playing to a house two-thirds empty (what was that about establishment outsider?), we were able to find seats in prime locations, and I suspect that the same will be true for the remainder of this show's run. Which is a pity, because this is a show that is more than worth the full ticket price.

Programme:
£2

Total Cost:
£17

Hurts Given And Received plays at the Riverside Studios until 9 May. Tickets £15 (£10 concs). Visit http://www.riversidestudios.co.uk/ or call 020 8237 1111 for more information.