Image: Patrick Moffatt, Beth Buchanan and Heather Bolton in Come Away With Me To The End of the World photograph by Pia Johnson.
Ranters Theatre’s Come Away With Me To The End of the World is, as its title suggests, an intimate invitation to abandon and to journey to unimagined endings. Enacted as ‘a quietly personal meditation’, we eavesdrop – with permission – on the central trio, in superb counterbalanced performances by Beth Buchanan, Patrick Moffatt and Heather Bolton. Callum Morton’s design – with Govin Ruben lighting, J. David Franzke’s sound design – under the direction of Adriano Cortese, collaborate with fine performances by Bolton, Buchanan and Moffatt to create a truly distinctive piece of theatre.
The production, literally, comes together across the meeting of two characters, becoming three. Set amidst a Manet-like ‘luncheon on the grass’, characters – moving gradually from the periphery – are drawn together, swaying like leaves in a summer breeze. The trio’s compositions counterbalance any theatrical voyeurism, where transitions are less blocked scenes than flowing gradations of movement and dialogue. It is not narrativised as to why they have come together; but there is a sense they always were. Perhaps waiting, perhaps present, perhaps hidden. The curiosity with which the characters hold each other sheds light on small spaces and private moments of existence. Dialogue is imaginative, stylized and authentic to the characters’ retelling of experience and situation.
The production trades in surreal-like liminality – places of in-between, somnambulant states and reveries – where characters’ desires to inhabit a world of sleepwalking, for instance, is acknowledgement of desire for something hidden. At times the production gives itself over to enchantment in a dancing tarantella troupe (Rosa Voto) and Demis Roussos belting out at tune atop of an alpine setting on the penultimate day of his life. But it is an extravagance that doesn’t belie the charm, authenticity and importance of the piece. Its meditative approach is less a response to revealing the psychological motivations of our everyday existence, than the idiosyncratic way our selves shifts incrementally beneath the skin of social contact.
Come Away With Me to The End of The World is alive with humour that is gently held and clever in its conceit as characters unspool experiences and, in turn, confront the limits of their dreams. Where the loneliness of their actions speaks to a kind of emotional voyeurism for the audience, we are instead reminded of the performances we encounter daily, in our conversations, transformations and dreams. The vision of Demis Roussos seems as philosophically relevant as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s dictum that inaugurates the ‘action’: ‘Grow Up? Never Never! Like existence itself, which never matures, staying always green. From splendid day to splendid day. I can only stay true to the stupendous monotony of the mystery.’
This is deconstructed theatre that doesn’t labour its intelligence. Its fine writing by director and cast, and astute direction doesn’t toil the insistence of making the audience aware of voyeurism. Characters step out of costumes, gently laughing in the joy of performance, perhaps a child hoodwinking another. The production, too, does away with the frustration of stage representation. Characters activate sets, both wry and knowing, not to disrupt the flow of scenes or parade an insistent call attention to the ‘fourth wall’. Listing likes and dislikes, the freely associative text is not prolix style, but, balanced by silence, soundscape and music (Evan Lawson), as characters become like a child before a listening parent.
Come Away With Me To The End of The World does more in its meditations on the intimate than theatre crammed full of ideas. Told with little pretense and such wry humour, its impossible to not be swept away to the end of the world.
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Come Away With Me To The End of The World
Devised by Ranters Theatre
Text: Heather Bolton, Beth Buchanan, Adriano Cortese, Raimondo Cortese, Patrick Moffatt
Direction: Adriano Cortese
Performers: Heather Bolton, Beth Buchanan, Patrick Moffatt
Design: Callum Morton
Composition and Sound Design: J. David Franzke
Lighting Design: Govin Ruben
Costume: Belinda Hellier
Choreography: Jo Lloyd
Musical Direction: Evan Lawson
Malthouse Theatre, Southbank
5–24 July 2016
