Written for Culture Wars
A staple amongst literary settings, largely on account of their inherent placelessness and urban ubiquity, the hotel marks a confusion of public and private. In this, their essence is the kernel of discomfort that all the complimentary biscuits and lotions, the excess cushions and pointed toilet rolls seek to disguise.
Our behaviour as guests differs from our everyday façade. We are either on our best or at our worst. Some will, as David Hare observes in The Breath of Life, clean before the cleaner comes round. Others trash and upturn. Encouraging extremity and abnormality as they do, the suite proves a hotbed (and breakfast) for drama. One thinks, immediately, of Blasted and the various shorts of Tennessee Williams, who himself was resident at New York’s Hotel Elysee for fifteen years, before dying in its Sunset Suite.
Hotel Confessions takes place in the Bermondsey Square Hotel, mostly in Room 509. Given both title and location, then, it beggars belief that its two shorts should make so little effort to interrogate the hotel as a species of place. In fact, the hotel room is used for little more than its layout: two twin beds side by side to be climbed across or lain in, a bathroom to be occupied and bedside tables to hold significant personal items. All of which could be achieved by replicating the hotel room onstage. This is site-specificity used as expedient alternative to a set, an entirely self-defeating notion. You’d think it a labour-saving device employed to circumnavigate the demands of carpentry. Can’t build a hotel room onstage? No bother, why not just book one for a couple of weeks?
What’s missing is any exploitation of its specificity, either functional or in terms of atmosphere. At no point does director Anouke Brook turn our attention to the smells and sounds of the urban hotel. We barely take in the blank wallpaper and the identi-kit furnishings, let alone smaller details. Instead, she sets up an end-on-ish space that happens to be in a hotel room. Behind us sits a sound technician with sound-system. It screams pretence. We are an ordinary audience watching an ordinary play.
It doesn’t even make a particularly good set. Given that the first, Brook’s own adaptation of Siegfried Lenz’s short story Die Nacht im Hotel (The Night in the Hotel), is a period piece, in which both men wear trilbies and stauch-shouldered suits, the Travelodge-style fittings seem completely out of place. They talk of Brooklyn, but they might as well mean Leatherhead. The same is just as true of Freya & Mr Mushroom. The remnants of baguette on the sideboard and the beret suggest France. The room does not. Wouldn’t a set have been more adaptable?
Taken sympathetically, The Night in the Hotel is the better of the two pieces. It starts in the hotel’s reception, with a snow-dusted traveller seeking a room. With no vacancies, he is eventually offered a bed in an occupied twin room. In room 509, the half-sleeping stranger breathes like a clogged exhaust, as Mr Sponge scrabbles around in the dark trying not to disturb, but failing.
Lenz’s story hinges their remaining strangers throughout the night. They must converse without knowing anything of the other beyond what is revealed. That, say, the stranger uses crutches and Mr Sponge is in town solely to catch the train in order to wave to his son. When Mr Sponge oversleeps, the stranger carries out his act. It is precisely his anonymity, his absolute untraceability, that makes his actions so touching. Brooks’s direction, however, is too afraid of the dark to manage that. A shame, really, because both Andrew Glen and Mark Carlisle are blessed with the sort of entrancing voices more than capable of carrying the piece through the darkness.
Nessah Aisha Muthy’s Freya & Mr Mushroom, in which an eight year-old girl invades a travelling salesman’s room, manages little of interest. It rings false, not only Hatty Jones’s armoury of act-a-child techniques, but also in the hackneyed swings between the barbed and the playful.
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