Third Angel presents
A man and a woman, trapped in a plain white room; a room that can become any room that holds a shared memory for them. They remember the times when they were happy together, and the times when, somehow, they weren’t. They think about the times when they could happily kill each other.
The text of Where From Here is in the collection There’s A Room, which is available through Drama Online and from Bloomsbury.
Devised by the company
Performed by
Jeremy Killick & Rachael Walton
Designed and Directed by
Alexander Kelly & Rachael Walton
Lighting Design by James Harrison
Soundtrack by Lee Sykes at Vortex Music
Set Construction by Vision Works
Publicity Photography by Rob Hardy (targets) & Alexander Kelly (kitchen)
Dramaturgy Placement: Catherine Wilson
Administration by Phillippa Yates & Hilary Foster
Close your eyes.
Close your eyes and remember a room you used to spend time in. A bedroom. A living room. A kitchen. Think about where the furniture was. Where the shelves were. When did this room get the sun? What time of day were you usually in here? Who did you share the room with? What memories does this room hold? What happened here?
Draw the walls. Mark the door and the windows. Draw the furniture. Put the ornaments on the shelves, the plants on the mantelpiece and the rug on the floor. Why do you remember this room?
Open your eyes.
Touring theatre piece, funded by The Arts Council of England, Yorkshire Arts, Sheffield City Council and the Performing Right Society Foundation.
Supported by Site Gallery, The ICA, and Sheffield Independent Film.
**
Where From Here toured the UK in autumn 2000 and spring 2001, followed by performances in Frankfurt and then the Edinburgh Festival Fringe as part of the British Council’s Edinburgh Showcase. This led to performances in Budapest, Lisbon, Mannheim and Brussels along with several international Creative Learning Projects.
Where From Here is discussed in a number of posts in the old Third Angel blog (here), and in:
Govan, Emma, Nicholson, Helen and Normington, Katie. (2007). Making a Performance. London: Routledge.
Heddon, Deirdre and Milling, Jane. (2006). Devising Performance A Critical History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
In a stark white room, a man sits listlessly on a chair while a woman practises target shooting behind him. “Sometimes he pisses me off so much I just want to blow his brains out,” says the woman. This is what happens when love dies: after the passion of love comes hate. Intimates act like murderous strangers.
Sheffield has already given us Forced Entertainment, one of the most influential new British theatre companies of the last 20 years, and in Third Angel it has produced another brave young company that is crossing boundaries and redefining the nature of theatrical experience.
Where From Here is like a postmodern version of Pinter’s Betrayal crossed with Sartre’s Huis Clos. It is set in a white, cell-like room from which the protagonists can never escape. The possibility of murder or suicide is ever present. The knives, guns and nooses are readily available, but the act cannot be done. The man and woman are paralysed by nostalgia, trapped by the constructs of their own lies and what once was and now isn’t. They cannot go back and cannot go forward. They are like souls in purgatory. It is sweet torment to watch them.
One of the best things about this show is its complete accessibility. So much work that challenges theatrical conventions is obtuse, cloaked in an armour of deliberate difficulty. Not this show. It is direct, fresh and grimly funny. There is a truth in the detail: the fag ends in the satsuma skin at the dinner party that leads to the affair’s consummation; the admission in a cheap, dirty Indian hotel room that he didn’t want to be with her, he simply didn’t want to be alone.
The man and the woman map out their shared past, drawing pictures of rooms they have both known, drawing on memories to excavate the past. But it cannot be recaptured. It is now a distant foreign land to them, its terrain made impossible to negotiate by a mixture of lies, evasions and sheer bloody-mindedness. All that is left for them is a retreat into nostalgia.
At the end, they sit on a chair awaiting a death that will not come, clutching at each other like the victims of some terrible natural disaster. But this is a tragedy of their own making that they will be forced to relive over and over.
Lyn Gardner, The Guardian, February 2001
