Wick High School, Caithness, 26 November 2009

ON A suitably wet and windy night some 35 brave souls turned up at the stark box which is Wick High School Assembly Hall to see the production by Less Is More of Paddy Cunneen’s new play, The Waltz of the Cold Wind, presented in association with North Highland Connections.

Andrea Gibb and Candida Benson in The Waltz of the Cold Wind

What they saw on the performance space before the play began was half a piano, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a table, a chair and a fridge. Clues there, perhaps, to the precise nature of Cunneen’s fascination with sound.

What emerges is a study in loneliness and obsession. Belle (played with great conviction by Candida Benson) lives alone in her flat listening endlessly to the sound of the Antarctic wind and harbouring strange notions of her origins as a sperm kept in a fridge.

She creates her own relationships by recording the on-goings of her neighbours and then editing them so that she can have imaginary conversations which turn out to have disastrous consequences, not for Belle, but for the very neighbours she records. This storyline, however, is never fully realised.
The only “real” conversation Belle has is with her mysterious alter-ego (a difficult role infused with much energy and humour by the ever excellent Andrea Gibb), who acts as a link between Belle and us, the audience, the real world. Which is just as well, for Belle cares little for the real world other than how it can be interpreted as sound.

She grapples with the dichotomy of listening as opposed to hearing, of how silence is amplified solitude, and there is much in the writing to admire with some strong speeches on the nature of isolation which, usually standing on the table, Benson delivers with heartbreaking sincerity.

The problem is, I think, that because we in the audience in turn have to interpret Belle through her “other” narrator – and however Andrea Gibb makes this character sympathetic the play is not about that character – we cannot really connect with Belle and her self inflicted isolation.

Although she expresses deep regret about the pain she has unknowingly, unthinkingly, inflicted upon innocent people, we do not, despite this, believe her. However much Belle tells us about what she feels, somehow the play offers no evidence for this. There is nothing she does that shows she really cares. Sitting alone in the dark for several weeks is only, in theatrical terms, reportage.

In the end this is the story of a woman who longs to be rescued, and the rescue is duly delivered in the last ten minutes or so when a Russian pianist (a strange Slavic cameo maintained with deceptive ease by Jan Semotam) who lives up stairs and who Belle, of course, has been recording, comes down stairs in his bare feet and speaking Russian which Belle, miraculously, understands because of the sound.

They drink coffee and then waltz to the sound of the Antarctic wind. With this beautiful image this moving and infuriating show comes to an end. With the strains of ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’ drifting into our ears we, the Wick audience, waltz off into our own night wind.

All theatre is welcome in Wick at anytime. and the applause at the end was genuine appreciation. Somehow The Waltz of the Cold Wind reminded me of Handel. His operas are not very dramatic, but they are extremely theatrical. Paddy Cunneen, who also directed the piece, has given us a modern version of that phenomenon, and if he can invest his characters with a bit more all round humanity he will bolster his already considerable reputation. In Scotland now, as Wick attested to, that will be most welcome.

© George Gunn 2009

Links

• North Highland Connections