Slap bang on the denouement of The Enemies, the stage explodes. Possibly. The directors haven’t decided yet. The script at this point says only ‘CRAZYSCENE,’ in enormous Calibri letters. This might incorporate video projections or Middle English, explain the play’s authors Yasu Kawata and Peter Shenai. Then again, it might just mean taking the set to pieces and screaming random fragments of Shakespeare.
Welcome to The Enemies. In case you haven’t guessed, it’s mad. The plot goes something like this: on the eve of his wedding, the Baron Romerstadt is visited by four masked strangers. The first he unthinkingly dismisses. The second proves harder to get rid of, hinting at some vague dark cloud that threatens to blacken his wedding day. By the third, the Baron loses control. He detects the hand of his nemesis Kubin behind the plot, and panics. His world is literally unravelling. Then he descends into CRAZYSCENE, everything blacks out, and he wakes up with a dead body at his feet.
There are some very clever games going on here. A fog of surreality suffuses the play from the first scene, and you have to ask yourself serious questions about sanity and identity in order to keep on top of the plot. The play has the same pervasive air of menace that you see in [i]Shutter Island[/i] or Jean Genet’s play [i]The Maids[/i], and this is sustained through some elegant pieces of mis-en-scene. These range from the obvious – the same actor plays all four visitors, radically changing his persona with only half-masks to help him – to the obsessively delicate: where the plot begins to break down, for example, the Baron’s pen stops working. Any assiduous readers of Jorge Luis Borges will notice all kinds of echoes of his compendium of short stories, Labyrinths.
But – and as the play I saw was very much a work in progress, this is only a potential but – at the time of the preview, The Enemies was not a powerful drama. A lot of work still needed to go into making the characters credible. This was especially true of the Baron, who will need to turn in a strong performance if he is to hold the play together.
If the cast can breathe more life into the script, The Enemies promises to be a deeply unsettling experience that will leave your head ringing with its insane babble of broken theatrical voices. If not, I can still recommend this play for its intellectual content, but it may struggle to get through to the hearts of its audience. This would be a scant reward for what is an ambitious and distinctive piece of new writing.
