MARK FISHER evaluates the latest creation from the imaginative Glasgow-based Vox Motus.

Bright Black (Design by Gary Birnie)

“THIS IS how you imagine people suffer,” says Martin McCormick’s Cerberus to Meline Danielewicz’s Claire. He’s complaining because the young woman has gone into a state of such neurotic grief since the unexpected death of her boyfriend that it’s as if she’s playing at being bereaved, acting like she thinks people are supposed to act rather than just getting on with it.

I’m with Cerberus on this one. Grief hits people in different ways, but on the whole, they don’t lock themselves in their flats, refuse to talk to their best friends and go into a kind of paralysis.

And even if they did, it wouldn’t be very dramatic. The limitation of Bright Black is that it’s about the aftermath of something, not the main event. It starts and finishes with a woman bereaved and has almost no development in between. In this, it is closer to a poem or a piece of dance than a regular play, exploring a mood by means of only the thinnest of narrative threads. It strikes a chord and sticks to it.

But what a chord! The show – written, directed and designed by Candice Edmunds and Jamie Harrison of Vox Motus – is a gorgeous piece of imaginative theatre, staged with meticulous attention to detail. Drawing heavily on Harrison’s skills as a magician, it creates a dream-like world where objects appear out of nowhere and float away of their own accord and where, at one point, even the laws of gravity do not apply.

Although Claire has stripped the flat down to the floorboards, the memories keep floating back, sometimes as a face projected onto a stream of dust cascading from the ceiling, sometimes in the form of the dead man’s coat that takes on a life of its own, and sometimes in the bin-bags that drop from above stuffed with his possessions.

Even a television remote control can spark an association ­- momentarily we see a football match projected onto her clothes – and when she’s bold enough to look out of the window (which, like so much else in this visually elegant show, emerges from beneath the stage’s floorboards) it ushers in haunting visions of the life she might have led.

Cerberus, as classical scholars will have noted, was the three-headed dog who guarded the gates to the underworld. Here, he symbolises the lingering presence of death and the seductive possibility that Claire should take her own life.

Joined by Jenny Hulse as the concerned friend, the actors perform with choreographic precision, circling, spinning, flapping with an upfront physicality that manages not to seem contrived. Throw in Michael John McCarthy’s ever-present score and you have a consummately staged show that more than makes up in poetic stagecraft what it lacks in drama.

See Bright Black at the OneTouch Theatre, Eden Court, Inverness, on 30 September 2009.

© Mark Fisher, 2009

Links

• Vox Motus 

• Mark Fisher’s Scottish Theatre Blog