Wind Bit Bitter, Bit Bit Bit Her

So. Well. Um. Right.

I really find a lot of work at Vaults doesn’t quite hit the mark. They market themselves as a sort of Edinburgh for London and people speak about them in vaguely laudatory ways on Twitter, but I’ve seen loads of brilliant, formally-expressive shows in Edinburgh that wouldn’t get made or seen or loved anywhere else, and I’ve seen, well, quite a few piles of unutterable shit at Vaults. Which is crude and unfair, I get that, but also, they made me sit through a much-lauded show about cycling last year which was both crap and, I’ll say it again, about cycling, so I feel a little fair game on the front of being an unutterable cunt.

It was therefore with trepidation* that I went to see WBBBBBBBbbbbBBbBbBhH and, well, so, well, um, right.

I’m going to go hard on the positives: I think the play, as evinced by having been nominated for the Soho’ Tony Craze Award [the Oscars of something, no doubt] is good and ambitious and more complex than it might at first appear. It’s a monologue of sorts about a bereaved mother called Mary who finds a disembodied arm on a beach and goes on a sort of conspiracy treasure hunt out of reality. It’s a really compelling narrative, and the world-building aspects of the text are deftly handled. The images build up and unravel at such a pace that the desired effect – I presume desired – of a woman clutching to anything that allows her to believe her child still alive – no matter its obvious unreality – is, well, effected.

That’s the good: I liked the story, I liked the way it was entextualised and the clear capacity for more than just plot that Sami Ibrahim’s writing offered.

However, I really had to dig deep for that praise and think about the text – whatever that means – beyond the performance in order to find it. Which isn’t really my thing but, well, whatever I don’t want to be mean. The whole thing is staged very strangely. There’s a stool and – for reasons that become so blisteringly, painfully apparent that you just wonder why they didn’t light the bloody thing in neon – a fridge. It’s staged in traverse, in a big ol’ room and it’s a big ol’ challenge to fill it, that doesn’t quite get met. The lighting is overused is probably a generous way of putting it (ill-thought-through, distracting and ugly is probably accurate).

The acting is fine. It’s all performed at precisely the paces you would expect – which is a stupid critique that undermines itself [*of course it fucking is*] – but what I mean is that the play works at the pace of the script, so when the text is a bit sad it goes slowly and when the text is a bit anxious it goes quickly, therefore the shocks at the plot and form level get evened out by a fairly expectation-answering performance style. (I think there’s also a problem when you have a second performer *spoiler* enter the playing space and perform for all of five minutes, meaning that coup de theatre disappears and you wonder whether it was just a mistake – not to mention it just being a bit rude to employ an actor only to shove them back offstage after five minutes but whatever, not my pervue).

There are some nice effects: I basically always like extended voice recordings onstage, though I’m not quite sure if or why this one worked; it’s nice, I suppose, to see a play in which two female characters can be in love without it being in any way a plot point – though this finds its corollary in the fact that anxious, mad mothers are hardly an underexamined locus of theatrical exploration.

Basically, I liked the play and can imagine a production that clears some of these things and I really hope that happens and it wasn’t the disappointment that the Vaults promised it might be but I just wish I’d been able to be more glowing about it.

*”With trepidation” ffs – it’s like I’m writing a review on Amazon for toothbrush heads. I’m rusty GET OVER IT.

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