One is Warm in Winter

As the audience assembles into the space, the large unshuttered windows let in the hazy light of dusk. This expectant, being on the verge of something, sets a lovely tone for what’s to come. The space has been stripped back, stripped bare, opened up and filled with apples. Apples sit on windowsills, crates of apples are on the ground, spilling onto the floor, apples hang from the rafters in clusters, or alone. The space is visually arresting, but doesn’t set you into a state of repose, it rather sets up a feeling of possibility.

Our anchor here, in this uncanny surrounding, in the first instance, is the title. It sets up a world of choice and compromise, to chose one you sacrifice the other. An oscillation between possibilities and choices, the real and the imagined, the lost and the found, gives what is a simple story of a spiritual pilgrimage, a complexity and variation not altogether linear or expected.

There is another important point that contextualises this piece. This production is part of the off-site program for the 2009 Parliament of the World’s Religions. This production is presented by Platform Youth Theatre, a company that facilitates theatre work for and by young people (aged 16-26). A call was made to people interested in taking part in a group devised project exploring themes of religion, faith and diversity. The group of participants come from a range of religious beliefs, traditions, cultural backgrounds and experience in theatre-making (for some this was their first time on stage).

In many ways the approach used a classical Community Theatre model: a particular community explores issues relevant to that community, using performance and theatre to facilitate the exploration. The aim is to discover new ways of expression and to arrive at new and regenerative concepts for themselves and their community. In this particular case, what united these people was their diversity and difference. ‘The Community’ is what was born out of the process.

Director, Caitlin Dullard, conducted workshops with this group of twenty people, focusing on theatrical explorations of religion and faith. Out of these workshops, writer Adam Cass, composed the play text. The result is this group’s meditations on the topics of religion, faith and diversity. The unpacking of these ideas is played out on stage. The ensemble cast functions very much like a Greek chorus to this end, we watch them move through an exploration of a range of different potentialities. This exploration moves very quickly out of a political focus and into the spiritual and universal. We teeter in a fine balance between the familiar and the strange. The co-existence of the spiritual and earthly, is the source of the magical.

The piece is playful in tone. There is enough tension to propel the story, but in essence it is not about a big clash of opposites, it is more a gentle swaying between antidotes. For this reason its effect is unexpected. I was surprised at how deeply I was moved.

The performances lacked craft and artifice. I mean this in a complimentary sense. The performers here have invested their own stories and experiences, and they offer them up in a most open and vulnerable way that is enormously engaging.

Director Caitlin Dullard supported this with a wonderful theatricality and finely crafted pace and rhythm. The setting of the tone, the great sense of movement and texture were wonderfully timed and executed.

I imagine that the process for this group of young performers and theatre-makers was an incredibly challenging, growing, and fulfilling one. That this gave fruit to a piece that spoke to, and moved, a wider community, affirms the power of theatre as cultural intervention.

One is Warm in Winter, The Other has a Better View

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