Paperweight, another first rate piece of alternative and inventive theatre at Summertown’s North Wall, is a play in which not very much happens. In fact, for the first five minutes or so, the audience is made to look at a unused stage – a generic office space with computers, files and nick-nacks – with no characters, bathed in half light. We grew a bit nervous and some people began to laugh nervously. My companion, ever the optimist, turns to me, deciding, “it’s going to be one of those plays, isn’t it?”. Well, yes, it is one of those plays, if these plays denoted as “those” are plays which challenge, entertain, surprise, shock and move. If those plays are the plays that make you see life in a totally different light, then this Edinburgh Fringe-first winning production is certainly one of those that will be talked about for a long time to come.
The company describes Paperweight as a near-silent comedy and the play depicts a day in the life of two men, Harry and Anthony, whose dead-end jobs in the Resource Department of an electrical appliance retailer simultaneously wear them down, and yet force them to look for alternative ways to occupy themselves. For a lot of the time the script is done away with and the action is key: whether it emphasised slow-motion eye rolling while watching a kettle boil, a hilariously elaborate mouse-trap like contraption that ends up popping a balloon, practical jokes or the never ending shifting of paper.
The humour in such situations ranges from the slapstick, to a dark and brooding irony, to the out and out bizarre. This is a frustrating show – and so it should be. The nullifying boredom of our two characters’ lives takes over audience members as yet another extended sequence of repetition begins, and their desperation to fill the day, to make something or simply to exercise their existence as thinking human beings, parallels our intense desire to see something happen. A touching equilibrium of co-dependency is set up between actors and observers, building our sympathy for them. The fact that the whole seventy minute piece is so beautifully acted only adds to this relationship we begin to feel we have with these two stifled eccentrics.
What also motivates our empathy is the inescapable knowledge that the world goes on around them. They are not Estragon and Vladimir, stuck in a timeless and motionless arena of expectant nothingness: they inhabit the real world, haunted by real aspirations and worries. One character’s father is soon to be put in a home, while the other frets about asking a colleague out on a date. Yet these real life details rest on the periphery of this deeply human play as most of the action concerns them, in this office, and what they do to pass the time. At times surreal (the description of a female co-worker’s escapades behind a filing cabinet with a dog and another colleague is marvellously absurd) and at times profoundly touching, we watch as their human instincts are crushed by work.
Work, it seems, robs us of our animal free-spiritedness, as well as our capacity for fun. In the final moments of the play (and I won’t spoil it for you, in case you should come across this play at some point in the future) we see a reversion to the primitive that might seem positive, but due to the overarching oblivion of the piece looks like a submission to life and, as is semi-confirmed by Harold, to death.
I could go on to mention the brilliant way in which music and tape recordings are used to both create humour and to suggest the passing by of the outside world. I could also wax lyrical about the physical stamina of the actors and the commendable focus and great skill of their performances. But I won’t. Instead, I will conclude by saying simply telling you that this is a show I will not forget, will look out for in the future, and one which in my opinion should become a classic and confirms North Wall’s credentials as a centre of pioneering theatre.
