Pool (No Water)

Strong production (by Winchester company S J Theatre Productions) of Mark in-yer-face-Ravenhill's play at Winchester Discovery Centre last night. A young cast - 3rd-year students, I understand - set the bar high, and provided a 90-minute through-choreographed performance, full of Frantic Assembly-style lifts and synchronised expressive movement to electro-ambient music, all the while clearly delivering the text, and with live digital streaming thrown in for good measure. There was constantly inventive use of bare stage with white cubes and a hospital screen to suggest various locations. Director Ryan Grimshaw and his cast must have worked for countless hours on this. Unless you've had a go at it, it's impossible to realize just how hard it is to do this stuff. It's tremendous to have such inventive and innovative wok going on locally.

While I admired the massively ambitious and inventive performance, I was less convinced by the play itself. The story seemed an oddly trivial one, and depended on us being fascinated by a world of drugs, celebrity and the talentless end of modern art, which I'm not. The Big Message - there are great people and little people - seemed a weak pay-off for all the frenetic activity building up to it. And as with some works by Sarah Kane, Dennis Kelly et al, if all those involved seem utterly appalling  it's hard to get involved with them. A problem increased here by the use of a chorus who are never defined into recognisable individuals. This short chapter in theatre history is coming to seem dated, like the YBA Sensation movement with which it seems to be loosely associated. And  - my final grumble - the piece seemed to have just one rhythm. However inventive the staging and skilled the delivery this kind of relentless high-octane experience is bound to run into the problem of diminishing returns: the tenth lift and shock poetic image is just bound to be less effective than the first.


All of which is up for debate and might simply be middle-aged grousing. Pool (No Water) is guaranteed a long life in drama courses as it ticks all the boxes and genuinely offers companies the chance to think creatively. And for the audience, it's good to have one's preconceptions of what a play can or should be challenged. Looking forward to more from SJ Theatre, and from the talented company: Ryan Grimshaw, Mark Flynn, Ruth Sanders, Ed Pontone, Becky Radcliffe and Michaela Bennison - all names to watch.