This multi-media piece created by the young company Analogue caused a splash on the Edinburgh Fringe last year. Almost as filmic as it is theatrical, it combines an unsettling score and video imagery with text and live action to tell the intertwining stories of the Mile End residents Alex, who lives with his wife Kate, and Michael, a troubled young man with mental health problems. Inspired by the real-life case of Stephen Soans-Wade, who in 2002 murdered Christophe Duclos by pushing him under a train, the work portrays the collision of two existences and two imperfect versions of reality - one, Alex’s, fraying at the edges, and the other unravelling. The threads of each are woven together by fate with the inevitability of classical tragedy into a single shared destiny on the platform at Mile End Tube station in East London.
Black-clad masked figures, like menacing puppeteers, glide about a set whose walls and furniture have an unnerving habit of sliding away unexpectedly. Michael, irrationally obsessed with the unreliability of weather forecasts and tormented by what seems to him the maliciously aggressive loud music from the flat below his, imagines that the floor beneath his feet is disintegrating. Alex, meanwhile, is prey to vivid dreams in which mundane mishaps - the shattering, for example, of Kate’s favourite mug - are premonitions of violent death. The dialogue is full of doom-laden portents. Birds inexplicably drop dead from the sky, there are rainstorms of biblical proportions. “It’s gonna be f***in’ murder out there,” says Michael’s neighbour on the stairs.
The 55-minute show conveys a sense of the unwitting interconnection of urban lives, and its visual inventiveness is impressive. But it remains elegantly insubstantial. Its characters are as flat as the video images, and the issue it raises - of the potentially dangerous abandonment in society of the vulnerable and mentally ill by the authorities - here becomes little more than a vehicle for slick theatrics. But if Analogue can develop their work further, coupling their presentational flair with more complexity and greater textual and intellectual muscularity, then the imagination and ingenuity here augur well for the company’s future.
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