directed by
Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett
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"Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies". Gore Vidal’s adage illuminates a side to human nature most of us would never own up to. But Mark Ravenhill has never been a man to shy away from controversy and he sets out to explore the feeling of seething resentment in his new play pool (no water), produced in collaboration with physical theatre impresarios Frantic Assembly.
Pool (no water) focuses on how a group of artists, who have been friends for years, handle the meteoric success of one of their buddies. They are invited to spend time at her holiday home complete with luxurious outdoor pool but then it all goes horribly wrong when she has a serious accident and is left crippled and unconscious. The play unfolds as she lies in a hospital bed while they decide to use the incident as the raw material for their next work of art and set about capturing her broken body on camera.
It is here that you glimpse the sick, twisted depths that people can sink to. While the celebrated artists made her name by using the "blood, bandages and condoms" from a friend who died of AIDS, she had surrounded herself with a truly hideous, malignant bunch of hangers-on. With friends like these who needs enemies? So consumed are they by their own navel gazing and spite that they contemplate agents, galleries and catalogues while she lays comatose and attached to a drip. All this and being a Ravenhill play, the script is littered with puerile wisecracks, expletives and overuse of the c-word. They also use her insentient body for their own amusements and take liberties with every orifice to gratify themselves, in a series of disturbing sexual displays, while she remains totally out of it.
Imogen Heap's soundtrack to this tale of professional jealousy, while pulsing and adding a suitably edgy, urban buzz to the perfidy, was also utterly incongruous, simply because the choreography was so stale and uninspiring - the performers never hit a sequence that really drew you in or chimed with the potency of Heap’s bespoke sound-scapes. The use of art installation graphics as a backdrop set the scene nicely but failed to follow through into ingenious onstage drama, and the use of strobe lighting to convey moments when the troupe were getting high just seemed hackneyed.
At times this production felt like a wry parody of the art scene, riddled as it was with such one dimensional, clichéd characters: one is a skinny junkie, one a camp queen, the other two harmless losers. They all dabble in drugs as refuges from, or aids to, creativity and eek out their days by doing art with the underprivileged. However caustic this dissection, the play also deals with ideas on the nature of talent and the talented, just as much as it does about the meaning and origins of art. Not to mention what people will do for success and how others come to terms with their terminal mediocrity and failure.
It also makes me wonder in what ways this play was drawn from real life. When Ravenhill's star was on the ascent did he experience this kind of backlash from friends? Or does he look haughtily on at those who are still plugging away in fringe venues, smiling to himself, and bringing to mind Gore's other assertion: "It is not enough to succeed; others must also fail."
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