WAR OF THE WORLDS AT THE ARTS THEATRE
Gareth Cassidy under interrogation
For a long while at the start of this exceptional film/drama, I wished myself anywhere but in the presentce of chaos in the weird crowded laboratory - or was it an operating theatre? The pace of this relentlessly oppressive is almost too much to bear. Coming round from complex surgery where his life has been at risk, our anonymous her0, is interrogated by the nameless team. Whilst outside the streets flashes of race riots relay civic breakdown, on a screen on stage Enoch Powell gives a muffled version of his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech whilst hate-enraged crowds surge against embattled police. He escapes from the scene into a ruined landscape haunted by massive tripod creatures with serpent like tentacles concealed inside their war machine..
Only here do we find the H.G.Wells narrative, where in days, civilisation is destroyed by invaders from another Galaxy. Our protagonist must get back to Epsom where his wife will be waiting for him.. In the course of his odyssey - so like all mythic stories - he meets a range of suspicious people - of colour. All of them he mistrusts, all are duplicitous or mad, all have it in for him. Even when he sees his wife again she is full of reproach for the angry unreliable husband he has been, he left her alone while he insisted on his own journey of discovery. The second half of the play is even more remarkable than the confused psychotic first. In a Dantesque journey hostility mounts with the weird malicious yet initially helpful, cast of often manic people.
Morgan Bailey on screen as ubiquitous horror figure
A French film ‘Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ based on a story by Andrew Bierce, won the 1962 Palme d’Or . 28 minutes long it features a Confederate plantation owner who is arrested by Union soldiers and sentenced to hang.. He escapes his captors and races through avenues of trees, crosses a river and at last gets home where his wife waits for him. All to the incessant drums of legendary Kenny Clarke.. At the moment of reunion he feels a thump on the back of his head. The entire escapade was in his imagination conjured between the moment the noose is put there and the fatal drop. Only several seconds but enough to contain his entire adventure.
Morgan Bailey and Gareth Cassidy
What began for me as a fearsome experimental drama developed into a brilliantly conceived presentation of thought political and social. It is a tour de force of theatre, after it I felt I had been in the presence of an intense piece of ultra modern creativity.
Bonnie Baddoo plays many characters, one more complex than the last was superb . Our hero’s earnest wife was a totally engaging Amy Dunn and Gareth Cassidy’ss clever, nuanced and convincing parts created the impression of a huge sequence of growing horror. When four actors took their bow, the audience gasped - where were the other 36 we imagined there.
Like the entire experience including homage to H.G.Wells anti colonialism it was a tour de force to leave the audience breathless with admiration.
Quite a turn around in one and a half hours.
