Exceptionally strong performances
Backward Glance
(2008)
multi story
Komedia Studio (Brighton), 3-8 May 2008. 19:00
How many stories can be told in a lifetime? How many stories can be told of a life? And how many stories can be told timelessly?
A woman has died. She was a writer, a poet, a mother, a daughter, a celebrity... But in death, she becomes a construct; a story that changes depending on who’s telling it. In this spectacular production Multi Story Theatre Company live up to their name, building for us, out of a small claustrophobic front room, a skyscraper of competing narratives from which to view the world and its equivalent layers of indeterminate truths. With exceptionally strong performances from Gill Nathanson and Bill Buffery, the actors moved through conversations and interactions between a husband and his shape-shifting female counterpart. The woman visually mirrored the photographs of his dead wife but physically adopted roles from the many aspects of her life, embodying a mother, a journalist, an investigator, and the ghost of the wife herself. Meanwhile her husband, in struggling to explain the uncertain circumstances surrounding her death, and in an effort to bring some cohesion to these shifting perspectives, idealises their personal story using grand and epic narratives borrowed from ancient Greek mythology. The transmutability of the woman through this telling and re-telling of her story, and the many stories she as a writer, told in life, causes her to be described as a past, present and future portal through which all of human life and experience can perhaps be glimpsed. The convergence of these layers in this woman as a vessel, hinting towards the notion of paralleled and simultaneous existence.
The performances were exceptional, often creating an intensely claustrophobic feel and sending many a shiver going down the spine. The only criticism I have of the play was its ending which was rather confusing, though I imagine its ambiguity may have been intentional as this was a play which unfurled questions for its audience, leaving plenty to ponder in its wake. The climax of the piece seemed to see myth and reality combine in the figure of the husband who becomes accountable for upholding some basic sense of morality. The media functioning as a modern-day mythology, of needing someone to worship and someone to blame – just as these roles have been lived out over and over again in different versions throughout human history - from the early morality plays to the magazine scandals of today.
[Alice Trueman]
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