Review: The Moon, The Moon, Southwark Playhouse

Written for Culture Wars

Perplexing and obscure don’t come close to describing Unlimited’s latest. Its narrative is nigh on unbreachable. Like an impossible puzzle, The Moon, The Moon provides enough clues to get started, but leaves out so much that there remain an infinite number of possible solutions. When faced with such openness, however, the onus to interpret disintegrates.

Clutching a polythene bag of turkey and trimmings, a dishevelled man stands on a beach pining at the moon. Taken in by a seemingly concerned local, he is chained and imprisoned in the basement of a local pub, from where he courts a former fiancée now identified with the moon. Yet, from this beginning of intriguing promise, The Moon, The Moon wanes.

There is a definite debt to Pinter at work, as the kindness of strangers is subverted into a menace of unknown motives. Yet, it is Pinter as wrenched out of orbit by the strength of its surrealism, which prevents the addition of its elements. Pinter’s skill is to permit ambiguity by begging questions of motivations unseen. Here, we understand that the torturous hoteliers have some dark purpose in mind, but even as it takes place, no light is shed. The pair conduct hasty surgery on their invited prisoner, removing his heart and several items suggestive of identity – staples signifiers of memory in devised theatre: a photograph here, a toy bus there – but why is anyone’s guess.

Usually, Unlimited Theatre’s concerns are scientific, seeking answers to the oddities that emerge from the cracks of understanding. So it is refreshing to see the company embracing something closer to mysticism. The trouble is that they overdose on the ineffable and inexplicable.

That is not, however, to deem it unsatisfactory. Its component parts are alternately sorely disconcerting and tenderly ethereal. The figure of the moon is a ghostly pervasive omnipresence, who seems to seep through the cracks in Rhys Jarman’s concrete walls. Helen Cassidy – herself, a beautiful mix of glassiness and colour – brings an overwhelming aura of melancholic calm and, thanks to Ben Pacey’s superbly dexterous lighting, fades between unearthly half-presence and concrete reality.

Though there is a degree of overplayed villainy from Suzanne Ahmet and Tim Chipping, Jon Spooner plays discombobulated victim with a beautifully blurred sense of self. He seems almost drunkenly disorientated, caught up in a reality of his own – perhaps alternate, perhaps invisible. Yet, there is little change throughout. His movement is unswervingly tentative and sluggish; his eyes remain fixedly aghast and baffled.

However, with so little on which to hang any inference about his surroundings, perhaps perplexity in perpetuity is the only way to respond.