Evocative and powerful
Live performance is unique.
No production is ever the same as any previous production, and the vitality and unpredictability which are thus generated ensure the freshest of revisitings.
As audiences, we forget that not only is live production always a one-off, but that it is also one of the most communal of acts. Rugby players, except when they really drop the ball, are rarely seen in flagrante, as it were. But droop an eyelid at the wrong moment on stage, and one can change audience expectation and response in a twinkling.
It is the job of the director to set up the play for performance, but there is a member of the production team – a stage manager – who ensures that it works. That there is continuity. That the technical bits like lighting and set are operational and the audience can suspend disbelief without even
realising that they are doing so.
Missy Mooney stage-managed this production. Tonight, she was the star.
Caress/Ache is not a play for beginners. The central focus of the multifaceted narrative is the sense of touch, and the senses can only be understood internally and individually, and communicated through those verbal images and common experiences in which such an emotion has been experienced.
Mooney worked her set with a fluidity which enhanced entrances and exits and created character relationships which, on occasions, had two different narrative strands operating at the same time. The set had the familiar minimalist Carving In Ice style and, with James Smith on the board, was lit with a professional and creative skill.
That, with the spartan but atmospheric sound score, created the perfect ambience for the character-driven action which, in turn, delivered a powerful, memorable, and very different dramatic experience for the audience.
Most drama entertains through action. This episodic play was all about educating the emotions, and while the tragically unexpected final sequence was powerful, the audience is far more likely to remember the emotion-filled sequences such as the scene in which a gentle woman calms a physically disturbed autistic man by touch, or the opening sequence in which a surgeon operates on a baby, apparently successfully until near the end, or some marvellous moments with oysters in which one could almost feel the texture as they slipped down the actors’ throats.
These were moments in which the power of the sense of touch was realised and communicated. Through them, aspects of the human condition we rarely visit, rarely vocalise, and in the handling of which have had little experience, were explicated and with a rare warmth and sensitivity.