Were it not so patently deadpan, I Am The Wind could easily be filed under the catchall term Theatre of the Absurd. It has the same existential strife and frustrations with language as many an absurdist classic. The only thing missing from Jon Fosse’s play, adapted here by Simon Stephens, is the absurdity.Instead, it comes across as a fable: two men in a boat, perhaps; or better still, two young men and the sea. For all that it appears elusive, seeming to obscure its driving force with metaphor and making you work to keep up, it is actually rather flat-footed. I Am the Wind may not be prescriptive in its meaning – each will find in it their own reflection, an outing for personal concerns and philosophies – but its ambiguity is not matched by multiplicity. It is too purified and, once one has settled into the sparseness of Patrice Chereau’s meditative production, watching it is rather straightforward. Not least because we’ve heard it all before.
Take the two men themselves. They could be strangers thrown together by their shared situation. They could be friends, brothers or even, momentarily, lovers. At base, it doesn’t really matter: they are simply The One and The Other. Whether separate entities or halves of a whole, what matters is that they are two. Just two men. In a Boat.
The One (Tom Brooke) is in the throngs of an existential depression. Both solitude and society, noise and silence, are unbearable to him. He speaks of intolerable heaviness, the burden of existence. He feels, he says, like a rock and longs for the true freedom of the wind. Life is paralysis, always terrifyingly uncertain: “I’m alive,” he says, “so I’ve got to say something.” From that paralysis comes a death-impulse, a draw to the edge of the raft, which, in turn, increases his terror and guilt. Death might be an end, but to die is an act, subject to the same neuroses as any other.
The Other (Jack Laskey) functions as both questioner and as comfort. He prevents absolute isolation without becoming a cacophony: he is company but never a crowd. He is the calm, caring voice that takes the edge off a ledge. Together they reach moments of equilibrium and the boat steadies itself.
Only ever, however, for a while. The tide always changes. The secluded spot always grows tiresome. In a world of motion, peace is never permanent. Fosse’s work tackles these rhythms of life: tension and stasis, calm and tumult. The struggle of existence is not the world itself but the window on it, the mind that ties itself in knots, the brain freezes and head fucks, the rising panic. Like The One, each of us seeks release from (self-)awareness and that can come from both stillness and occupation. Either way, it will snag, the mind will glitch and the dread will return.
All this is well and good, but its also rather well-trodden territory, especially since I Am the Wind wrings existentialism through an old mangle: the boat has long served as a distillation of existence. It cuts man off from society and pits him against his environment. “An image,” says The Other, “should say how something is…But in the end it always says something else.” In the case of the boat, for all the metaphor’s robustness, I’m not convinced it can.
Nor am I convinced that Stephens’s chosen writing style suits such a narrow metaphor. His words here are simple, often elemental, and blunt. Their lyricism is unflowery and rhythmic, almost liturgical. With it’s echoing repetition and bluntness it is beautiful on the ear, as questions and answers thud back and forth, but less on the mind. As Dan Rebellato has recently pointed out, Stephens’s dialogue is often direct and acutely self-aware. Given a broadly naturalistic situation (even one not played naturalistically) that offsets the action, making it distorted and counter-intuitive. Here, however, the narrative is already so staunchly metaphorical that the text’s falling into line further flattens the whole.
Chereau rightly follows Stephens’s minimalism with admirable precision, if sparse invention. Richard Peduzzi’s set magnifies a puddle in a playground until it becomes an ocean. Out of the water, unexpectedly, rises a platform on a mechanical pivot, which stands in for the boat without attempting mimesis. It could be a simple raft, but the text speaks of bows and sails. Actually, it’s a rather awkward flight-simulator-esque contraption with a tendency to puncture the fiction with ridiculousness as much as reality. It can trip into resembling a magic carpet or, worse, a bucking bronco.
On it, however, Chereau’s composition of his actors is strong, echoing Renaissance seascapes and Gormley’s cast-iron sillouhettes, but it lacks the layered resonances that might make the whole multiply. Brooke and Laskey give committed, parched performances. Brooke, in particular, makes intelligent choices. His appearance is haunted and malnourished, as it his body were vacuum-packed around his skeleton. His smudges his words as if deaf. When he speaks he almost regurgitates words like a bird feeding its offspring, stopping abruptly as if giving up at the first signs of a stammer. Communication is not just hard, it’s a physical trial. Laskey has less to play with, but makes a sympathetic foil and a caring companion.
I Am the Wind is neither drab nor dreary, it is an honest expression of life’s difficulty. To accuse it of misery-mongering is to ask for rose-tinted specs. The trouble is the sterility of Chereau’s intentionally monochrome production and I found myself longing for shades of grey.
Photograph: Simon Annand
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