A tender meditation on grief
Betroffenheit Sadler’s Wells
Betroffenheit is not at all easy to watch, and nor was it ever going to be.
Premiered in 2015, first seen at Sadler’s Wells only last year, and back this week for just two performances with an Olivier award now under its belt, it was conceived by actor and playwright Jonathon Young in the wake of an appalling personal tragedy: losing his daughter and her two cousins in a fire during a family holiday in 2009.
Over the subsequent months and years, Young began to write down his experience of trying to come to terms with the loss. He then turned to choreographer Crystal Pite, a family friend (currently riding high after her recent, remarkable debut with the Royal Ballet), to help him turn this into a piece of theatre. The result – created by and starring him, choreographed and directed by her, and featuring five pin-sharp dancers from her Kidd Pivot troupe – is an astonishingly ambitious, brilliantly realised, tender-hearted meditation on the nature of bereavement, grief, and coping strategies.
Taking its name from the German word for “shock” and the sense of bewildered mental stasis that can emerge in its wake, the piece begins with apocalyptic sounds thundering from the speakers, and with an electricity cable snaking – magically, frighteningly – across the floor.
Suddenly, there is the solitary figure of Young, marooned in the cold confines of the “room”, the space in his mind – self-protective, but also self-imprisoning – to which, we gather, he immediately retreated upon learning the unthinkable.
As he engages in fraught, solipsistic exchanges with his own pysche (“Is he at fault?”; “Oh my God! Oh my God!”; “The system’s faulty”), we feel ourselves slide ever deeper into his nightmare. Indeed, the first, particularly dance-theatrical half has the air of one of those feverish nights when you feel yourself coming down with something, can’t quite tell if you’re asleep or awake, and random thoughts lodge insistently in the mind.
As Pite says in a fine programme note, “Jonathon was interested in the relationship of trauma and addiction, and how these things very often go hand in hand”. This particular line of inquiry generates one of the show’s masterstrokes. Before long, a gaudy, tawdry quintet of hoofers appear on stage, decked out like a cut-price Vegas act. Grimly incongruous in these stark, industrial surroundings, these graphically represent the temptation to seek flimsy, untenable solace in substance addiction. Through all their forced, high-octane gaity, it’s increasingly clear that they are in fact entirely sinister, a sense heightened by the meticulousness of their movements: these demons shouldn’t, and don’t, put a foot wrong.
The second, more contemporarydance-filled half plays out on an opened-up but still murky stage. As in the first section, the microscopic synchronicity of the performers – both with each other and with the pre-recorded conversations that boom out across the stage – is extraordinary: no verbal inflection is left unaccounted for in movement, and both Pite’s and the dancers’ attention to detail is magnificent.
By now, one gathers, Young has perhaps dared at least to venture outside his “room”, even if he is largely still lost in his own head. Repetitive thoughts are still ricocheting hither and thither, and there is of course no complete escape from his grief. By the tentatively optimistic end, however, you feel that he might, finally, have worked out a more functional means of facing the future. Or, put another way, that through sheer, herculean determination, he has finally found the keys to his own psychological prison-cell.