The Shape of Pain

Woolf wrote in “On Being Ill” of pain’s relation to language. ‘Let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry”. In making the body an object made of objects, ones simultaneously alien to and congruent with the whole, pain destroys language. How does one put into words the colour, weight and definition of a stubbed toe or a migraine or a broken bone? Pointing is fine. Moaning is fine. Try finding a way to allow another to feel with you in language, and you can’t help but fall short.

So, The Shape of the Pain has at its heart a worthwhile and interesting premise: find a way to explore theatrically what pain can feel like.

And what does pain feel like? Well, my experience – because this play is about what you experience apparently, because they tell you that at the beginning that you are going to go “into” the pain, which sounds stupid but will probably pay off, right, with this set and this team and the Summerhall badge? – was one of a strong desire to nap; a bit of a headache; an occasional confusion as to why people were laughing so much; an overwhelming greyness; some projection; lot of nice words spoken quite nicely.

A monologue plays out, a story about a woman in pain – a well-written monologue but still just a monologue – and they surtitle all of it – but not in a complicated way where the surtitling tells you something. Occasionally the words are a bit bigger but mainly they are just there, distracting you and making you focus fifty per cent on the speaking and fifty per cent on the reading, which really makes you focus one hundred per cent on not nodding off. There’s some sound design that sounds quite screechy and occasionally loud and did nothing for me. There’s some lighting on some grilles that doesn’t really mean very much but looks nice and grey and serious.

I really cannot understand why people are getting so het up. It’s not fun, it’s not witty, it’s not saying anything new or really all that interesting, it doesn’t get over itself and start doing anything because they’ve decided how they are going to do it this way with this form (Chris Thorpe being a really good writer of beautiful lines helps) and then they do it.

It seems like the show would have been so much more interesting if the people making it had realised that their project is doomed to failure – “we said at the beginning you can’t communicate pain, at least not through ordinary language, so why an hour later are we still trying using a lot of words” – if they had been brave enough to let the thing feel less finished, less constructed, less thetic, they might have had a shot at at least saying something, or at the very least being less serious about it all. What they really needed to do was to create a new sort of language with which to try to describe pain – also an impossible task – but one that might at the very least have been funny to try to observe. And you can imagine a Breach version of this show that recognises all its limitations and that becomes the point and you might not get somewhere, but at least you would not get anywhere together.

This, however, is paper over so many cracks: all bluster. It bored and disappointed in equal measure.

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The Shape of the Pain is on at Summerhall (who should know better) until the end of the month.

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