NSDF: “They Shoot elephants, don’t they?”

“People are the ultimate spectacle.” These are the words emblazoned atop the original film poster for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? I’d be very interested to know whether Elephant’s Graveyard deliberately set out to disprove this slogan as people are the one thing that their play neglects. There is a town and there is a circus. There are bags of popcorn peeking out from curtains. There are slatted wooden crates, gauze screens and coloured bunting. There is mass hysteria and petit-bourgeois morality and there is elephanticide. There are interlocking monologues and physical set-pieces, choreographed to within an inch of their lives. But there is no characterisation. Meekly established conventions and over-wrought aesthetics don’t help. Mimed dialogue behind the monologues makes a brief appearance before retreating, tail between legs. An over-reliance on profiles and spotlighting washes out the cast’s features and with it any potential empathy.  Having a cast of fourteen repeatedly scratching and worrittin’ in the background on a sand-covered stage proves distracting. Erwin may be a small town that has “forgotten its own name” but it is also a town that has forgotten about people. The characters are victims of the show’s central conceit- repetitively paced monologues dull any sense of individual motivation.  Townspeople are barely distinguishable from the Circus folk. Issues of race, gender and poverty in post-war Tenessee are buried deep with the elephant carcass. They may not shoot the elephant, but they sure do shoot themselves in the foot.      

NSDF: Vowel Play

It is easy to be facetious about Vowel Play. The play limits the speech of its characters to just one vowel each. So snarky questions can be mooted over pre and post-show pints such as “Do all the standard vowels make fun of ‘Y’?” Yet quibbling in this way over the central ‘gimmick’ skirts lazily round what’s actually going on in the show.  The salient pub-bound question seemed to be an ominous “How the hell was this going to work?” Maybe what we should have been asking was “Why try to make it work in the first place?” What was the end product of these verbally-peculiar means?   

The curious audience member entering the theatre will be instantly alerted to Vowel Play’s meta-theatrical intentions. Four microphones and a technician walled in by a sound-desk are the obvious visual clues to this. The premise quickly establishes itself as a (radio?) play within a play with the pre-set technician representing Sally, the play’s director. Intimate stories from the four characters’ pasts come to light (quite literally, as a single spotlight makes an increasingly awkward attempt to guide the audience through the oral collage) before the rehearsal/scene ends and the ‘actors’ leave.      

Once you accept the slippery conventions of the play, the characters that emerge are fascinating. The language of the four female speakers is necessarily dominated by the sounds dictated by the script, and so too are their performances and personalities moulded by their assigned vowel. Kim (A) was brusque and declamatory; Hannah (E) the most under-stated and eloquent (verbosity being possible with ubiquitous ‘E’, naturally); Jess (I) brittle and startling; and Beth (O) mirrors the unsettling qualities of her letter, which is sly in its ability to be both soft and hard.  

Belied by the bevy of students crying “Gimmick!” is Vowel Play’s persistent commitment to meta-theatre. The play aesthetically distills key elements of acting and theatre-going. The constraint of the single vowel mirrors the notion of a script in a way that teeters on caricature. And the unexpected focus on the speakers’ private lives serves to remind the viewer of a predisposition in theatre to confession. What is troubling is that this in turn highlights our own voyeuristic pleasure in hearing these confessions. In truth, beyond Vowel Play’s jarring poetic language can be glimpsed some of the most absorbing questions about theatre, voice and story-telling. And it would be a shame if these were overlooked by such banalities as “Yeah, but where was ‘U’?”