Unfortunately, previews sometimes don’t provide the opportunity to glean even a partial impression of what the precise impact of a show will be when it is actually performed. In the tradition of late twentieth-century absurdist drama – the influence of which was apparent even prior to asking about it – what is not said, rather than what is said, appears to be the key factor of dramatic interest in Rendezvous. Whilst the premise of the play is two men in a room, waiting to be called for a highly desirable job interview, it is not the interview itself which is of importance, but what can happen within the space of the room.
As such, although the scene performed was a work in progress and scripts were still in use, the physicality of the scene was what initially struck me the most. The exchange of glances and silences was already quite nuanced; Josh Dolphin skillfully begins the scene with a nervous barrage of small talk, displaying his character’s nerves and feigned arrogance through his wary glances to the side, shuffling of his tie, and his habit of self-consciously placing himself at a distance from Dan Byam Shaw’s seemingly far more composed character. While the portion of the script I saw was absurd primarily for its tongue-in-cheek treatment of the mundane, it opened up numerous questions regarding the characters’ puzzling relation to, and memories of, the room itself, something that is also apparently vastly expanded later in the script as the tone grows still more absurd and the characters’ understanding of the structures surrounding them begins to unravel. We are not even offered names for these characters – rather, the names of the characters are deliberately elusive – something that will apparently come into play more significantly later in the show.
Exactitudes of the staging are still to be properly figured, but writer and director Anthony Maskell is full of ideas as to how to illustrate the subtextual elements of the script. Even at the preview, however, a ticking clock was placed as a blank noise in the background, deliberately drawing attention to the passing of time in the room. Various other ideas including lighting effects and having the shadow of a metronome moving across the stage have been discussed as potential methods of illustrating the characters’ sense of time fluctuating around them.
As mentioned, however, at this point I believe it is impossible for me to render the completed work of this production, for it will be a subtle exploration of the relation of the characters to the space of a room – perhaps a metatextual exploration of the stage’s own relation to the room, even – and will work to reveal the arbitrariness of the language and the fixed perspective on life that people use to define themselves
