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.

Vowel Play at NSDF09 (from Noises Off)

This was one of my favourites of this year's Festival, for various reasons. Apart from anything else, it gave us 'word geeks' a chance to show off and be a bit playful - some writing reviews using only univowels (chat, back, look, floor, that sort of thing), or not using the letter 'e' (quite a feat, Shutters). I chose to include the letter 'u' in every sentence, as it never occurs in Vowel Play.


It's a funny thing about words. We use them to communicate with each other – that's what they're for – and yet there are those of us that won't say certain words. That could mean deliberately avoiding swearing, or it could just be that some words don't sit easily in some mouths. How often do you hear chavs use words like 'presently', 'exponential' or 'gosh'? When did you last hear someone say 'cheery' or 'frenetic' out loud?

Dartington's Vowel Play takes this idea to a whole new level; each character is allowed to use only one vowel. From the off, it's a fascinating exploration of speech and writing technique. Not only is each of the four women on stage given a different style of talking (necessary because of the kind of words that they have available), but it's also a tough call for a writer to pull off half an hour of speech with such a specific rule.

A case in point is Carey Mackenzie's Hannah – using the vowel 'e' – who can't talk about herself as 'I' (because Jaz Woodcock-Stewart's Jess has that vowel), instead talks about other people, mainly her Greek lover, Elle [it's pronounced Ellie, but that can't be right, because Ellie's got an 'i' in it]. However, she sounds like a bad tape recording where some of the words have been missed out, because none of her verbs can have 'I' in front of them.

What happens with the removal of four vowels from a person's speech is that – immediately – they have to start thinking of new ways of saying things. It might sound like it's a terribly restrictive thing, loosing so many letters, but in fact what it actually does is force these four women into new means of expression. They often can't use what seems the most obvious way of saying something, because of a stray vowel that belongs to one of the others. You can see it most clearly when they're setting levels on the microphones. After Hannah has said 'Test', Billie Beckley's Kim has to find a word using 'a' instead of 'e'.

Another thing that becomes apparent very quickly is that these women can't communicate with each other in normal conversation. The rule they exist under makes vast swathes of the English language out of bounds to them – perhaps most significantly, the words 'communicate' and 'conversation' can't be pronounced, because they have more than one vowel. While this urgency for new expressions is the script's strength, it is also its weakness. These women can't use words like 'hope', 'friend', 'chance', 'phone', 'advice' and 'chocolate'. I don't think I'd want to live in a world without those things.

But is it ultimately – as Jess fears – a bit 'gimmicky'? While it may sound like a purely literary exercise for people who like words, Vowel Play also has its warm human heart in the four women who perch behind the microphones. This is a mode of writing that really doesn't work for dialogue, but gives great opportunities for monologues. There are several here, and it's difficult to fault any of them. They flit between touchingly sad and brazenly funny – with healthy doses of sex along the way.

So it's maybe a little bit gimmicky, but it handles its gimmick well, forcing language to change and adapt to each character every time their mouth is opened. That's what makes it interesting, and that's why it is a strong half hour of drama.