4 Bar and Rising at NSDF10 (from Noises Off)

The poor common man at the centre of 4 Bar and Rising is under a lot of pressure: mounting paperwork and networks of dependency have reduced him to a human pinball. The boiler in my house rarely gets up to one bar, and that heats the house fine – these days it's too much. So I dread to think what four bars must be like. This man's plight, as he is pinged around the stage while trying to shrug off the burdens of his world, is one that taps into the essence of modern life. It speaks to each of us living in a society with dress codes and a reliance on exam results as a means of determining worth.

4 Bar... speaks most strongly against the society it finds itself in when Adrian Spring finds himself forced to bear with him a wad of important papers, which between them determine and rigidly classify his life. His birth certificate, exam results, CV, marriage and divorce certificates and all that tiresome bureaucracy that has turned him into the dazed, confused and pressured individual he is. They are all things expressing an obligation on his part (even that of registering his birth) – yet not one demonstrates any benefit he gains, like a wage or food. Most explicitly, a final – unidentified – piece of paper is dangled in front of him and placed just out of his reach. As he strains against the elasticated rope holding him back, struggling to keep hold of the other papers (ie. his entire life, in this society's value-structure), desperate to reach the piece of paper (clearly representing the wages/benefits for the generic proletariat) denied to him, the tension builds and the anti-capitalist allegory becomes very clear. Then the tension snaps – and of course the working man had been denied his rights.

His final act is a liberation not only of mind and body but of the individual from the strictures of a capitalist society that categorises and codifies its citizens amid swathes of bureaucracy.
Alternatively, it may be about something entirely different. To be honest, I really wanted 4 Bar and Rising to be about weather reports. I hoped for some Met Office experts to be pointing to colourful maps of the UK as isobars swept across the Pennines and deposited buckets of rain over Scarborough. Ideally, there would be four isobars, although I don't think that means very much pressure – I'm not a weather forecaster.

There was a man who struggles to cross roads because he worries that some other people will throw sheets of paper at him. They might also tie an elastic rope to him and ping him about like a human pinball. It becomes a live essay on the dangers of bullying. But don't worry; there's a nice ending. Our dazed, confused and abused young man remembers a Christmas or birthday, when his dad gave him a skateboard (represented here by a long metal bar). It's a touching tribute to the power of interpersonal relationships, especially within families.

Actually, neither of those really works and everything I've thought about 4 Bar... has been at best incomplete and at worst flawed. It's the sort of piece that ought to be played about with in an audience's collective imagination for long after the applause dies down. There are a myriad ways of looking at it.

Each member of the cast has a clear idea of what their piece means, and appear to want each audience member to feel that too: an individual interpretation that doesn't depend on any prescribed meaning from elsewhere. So, for those of you that had a meaning worked out – however incomplete – that's great, don't worry about it matching up with any other view, least of all that held by the cast. For the rest of us, 4 Bar... raises questions about how important it is that we pin down the exact meaning of a performance.

In the end, almost any interpretation is equally as valid as another: so said cast member Sam Powell in yesterday's discussion.