High Tide

Apparently not quite satisfied with cramming as much theatre as i can afford/make time for in my working week, I went up to Halesworth, Suffolk for the annual High Tide theatre festival this Bank Holiday weekend, a festival that trailblazingly provides a platform for emerging theatrical talent, especially for dramatists.

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This year saw three plays being performed, alongside associated talks, free film screenings and rehearsed readings. The two plays i saw were outstanding (the third, Ditch, I'm seeing at its London transfer in a few weeks). Admittedly I'm biased about one, Moscow Live, as it was written by my friend Serge Cartwright, but I've never been one to wax enthusiastic about things i loathed, and I'm not about to start anytime soon. The play is set in the news room of TV station Moscow Live, a State-run, English-speaking 24hour news station staffed rather unevenly by over-paid young British ex-pats and idiosyncratic Russians - a team who spend most of their time twiddling their thumbs and the rest of the time drip feeding hilariously bizarre fluff features and regurgitated headlines to negligible viewers. Things are suddenly shaken up by the death of Slobodan Milosevic (in UN custody awaiting trial for crimes against humanity at the time of his death); an event of clear international significance but which the Moscow Live staff fail to notice while busy playing word games, and to which they are only alerted to via CNN and BBC headlines. it's furious action stations but then a crisis: how exactly to report the death? How to cast the central character, Milosevic, when the state funds the news report, but the report is written by Westerners, and ill-informed ones at that? Western villain or victim of the West? as arguments rage, staff relationships and personal interests come to influence decision making, journalistic integrity bristling against personal agendas and private grievances. Creating a narrative proves a personal quest as well as a problem in terms of news reportage - how the central characters cast themselves and each other in their own stories proves as pivotal to events and the impact of teh play as how they chose to vilify, victimise or canonise global historical figures. What begins as a lightweight comedy develops into play with a meaty dramatic thrust, where provocative questions that resonate on a multitude of levels (personal and political) are coaxed from the central narrative premise with a deftness that never feels forced or heavy-handed and leaves you questioning, questioning, questioning - long after the applause fades.

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I had spotted the rather elegant playwright Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig slinking around Halesworth as she was wearing the most chic yellow Oriental-inspired quilted jacked; i was in awe of her even before i had seen the jaw-droppingly spectacular Lidless (which she wrote) - a play that i had feared might be eye-stabbingly heavy-going as it was about Guantanamo, but which was anything but. A role reversal of the relationships central to films like the Night Porter (which was showing for free at the festival), the play saw the reunion of a female interrogator at Guantanamo and male detainee, a Pakistani Muslim picked up in Afghanistan. Fifteen years after she shamelessly used her feminine wiles as a weapon, her detainee tracks her down to Texas to claim half her liver - he is dying and wants her to save him. She, however, has taken pills to forget her time at Guantanamo and remembers nothing. This premise is merely the beginning of a play that is onion-like in the myriad layers it peels away and explores. Performed in a white-washed bunker-like building, with the actors wearing black and white - there's only a fleeting pop of bright orange (in the form of a 'Gitmo' suit and sari), lighting that varies between spotlights, hanging industrial lights and strip garish bulbs, and being staged in the round, the effect is stark to say the least. you can't look away - you are forced to digest all of the unsavory events as they unfurl. it's an incredibly intense experience; just as you register one thunderclap of information, another rumbles behind - it's like being slapped constantly round the face, and you sit there, palms sweaty, mouth agog, virtually unable to digest the emotional weight of everything that's being thrown at you. if there is one criticism, it would be that there could have been a little more fluff, some downtime to let the dust settle before the next dramatic revelation or development. but this it to make it sound too much, which it certainly wasn't, it was brilliant - clear and powerful; complex without being complicated. You emerge feeling wrung out, wholly spent, but it's worth it. If you're going to the Edinburgh festival YOU MUST SEE IT. for everyone else, it's sure to get a London transfer, so book early.