Visible Fictions, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, and touring 2006

Prince, Holly & Callum in Prince Unleashed. (© Drew Farrell)

YOUNG PEOPLE’S company Visible Fictions seems intent on giving its audience a hard time. Last year, it toured a show called Big Baby which painted a bleak view of capitalist excess taken to its most destructive and depressing conclusion.

Now it’s on the road with Robert Forrest’s ‘Prince Unleashed’ about a young girl going through the psychological trauma of losing her parents and her beloved dog, Prince, in a car crash, and finding herself stuck with her unlovely relatives. As my rather shaken nine-year-old companion said at the end, hers is the sort of story that would “send teenagers into depression”.

But if you can cope with a show that’s too miserable even to leave us with a proper happy ending – just a begrudging “what do you think will happen?” – ‘Prince Unleashed’ is a fascinating theatrical experiment.

The novelty is that it’s all played out over headphones. We sit on either side of a simple platform stage, concentrating as much on the sounds inside our heads as on the three actors in front of us. Using a mixture of live and pre-recorded voices plus all manner of stereophonic sound effects, the play has been written to work equally well on stage and radio (it is broadcast on Radio 4 on 25 March).

It enables Forrest to use tricks commonly used for broadcast – quick cuts from scene to scene, internal monologues, imaginary friends – in front of us on the stage. Most notably he does this in an extended dream sequence in which the bereaved Holly (Helen McAlpine) and her cousin Callum (Steven Ritchie) jump location from funfair to car to bedroom in the time it takes to change a sound effect.

Whatever the age it’s pitched at, it’s rare to see a play as structurally strange as this, let alone one that depends so heavily on the audience supplying its own imaginative pictures. The technique allows Forrest to give shape to Holly’s post-traumatic projections, her invisible dog embodying the life she has lost in the tragic accident. It eventually finds three-dimensional form in actor Steven Cartwright, the dog “unleashed” and determined to realise all her darkest desires.

You can’t imagine a conventional stage play dealing so effectively with such an abstract concept which, coupled with the novelty of its presentation, makes ‘Prince Unleashed’ well worth seeing.

Admittedly, the technique is unlikely to catch on – it deprives us too much of the direct interaction between actor and audience – but if there’s something dispiriting about the play, it’s that Forrest denies us the resolution that his archetypal story-telling seems to require.

(Prince Unleashed can be seen/heard at Lyth Arts Centre, 21 March; Community Centre, Mallaig, 4 May; Spectrum Centre, Inverness, 12 May)

© Mark Fisher, 2006

Link

• Visible Fictions