Written for Culture Wars
Though it may ‘quickly dream away the time,’ David Leddy’s Susurrus works out as little more than a stroll with enhanced aesthetics. Armed with a map of Holland Park, on which are marked eight checkpoints, you wonder deeper and deeper into the greenery while four intersecting monologues seep gently into your ears.
Each of these muses on and mirrors A Midsummer Night’s Dream, picking up its refrains wherever possible without cramming them in forcefully. There’s a man who talks about a breakdown and a woman who talks of her father’s death. There’s a shrill pensioner, who speaks of Benjamin Britten’s opera (which accompanies you as you move from point to point) and an odd male voice who lectures on the anatomy of starlings when dissected. Perhaps they fit together, perhaps their overlaps are merely coincidental.
Their soft Scottish sibilance purrs away, soothing and gentle. So relaxing, in fact, that it near empties your brain of thoughts. A bit like a cleaning cassette, the words wash through your ears, cleansing, but quickly forgotten.
The trouble is that is rather hard to care about the experience of others – especially absent others – when you’re having a rather pleasant experience of your own. As with so much audio-work, the presence of a soundtrack heightens receptivity to your surroundings and their atmosphere. But then, so does an iPod on shuffle, if you let it. By placing what is essentially a radio play on location, Leddy detracts from his own writing, which I suspect, would benefit from a more concentrated listening experience.
Of course, that would mean losing the recurring sense of woodland magic, which is inherited from the Dream rather than really transformed by Leddy’s text. This, it seems to me, is Susurrus’s sole success: it turns a promenade into a meandering dream. Like dreams, however, the meaning of it is hard to pin down and, by the time your eyes re-open, it’s more or less faded from memory.
0 comments:
Post a Comment