The play itself is about a broken system, but this production, is a smooth-running machine.
The system is founded in rules; in Lush’s words – “We’re all in this game together.” So when staff sleep with patients, boundaries are crossed, rules are broken and punishment is necessary. The torture of Lamb (William Thatcher), in room 1A, tampers with the audience’s senses, to create a visceral disturbance. MacDonagh and his team successfully play with anaesthesia; our sight is obfuscated by a cloudy curtain and red lighting. This sudden deficit of perception is even more acute having become accustomed to a wider, Big Brother visual field, thanks to the CCTV footage. Our hearing is corrupted throughout by an eerie musical motif and intermittent emissions from the intercom. These sounds and the constant twitching of interference on one of the videos disrupt the backdrop, acting as an emblem of unease of the establishment and its more fundamental foundations.
The “rest home” embodies a world that operates under a caste system. The tiered staging beautifully asserts the preoccupation with hierarchy within this institutional sphere. The feudalism of Staff, Understaff and Patients demonstrates the divide between, “him who is to be treated and him who is to treat.” Competitive forces hold the Hothouse galaxy in place; the most palpable contest between Lush (Jordan Waller) and Gibbs (Ziad Samaha) who mirror one another in their battle for power. Yet at the same time these two flunkies are polar opposites. Waller does hot; a plosive tirade of “barbequed bore by the lake” ignites the audience, while Samaha does icy; his chilling cold-bloodedness successfully marks him out as the other, the only rock left standing after the collapse of the structure.
Although the play does not ooze scope for theatricality, various dramatic genres are played with. Patterns of repetition, synonymous with absurdist theatre, pervade the action – the symmetry of head snapping from Cutts (Ruby Thomas) and Gibbs projects a powerful tableau , while cycles within the language –“small? Not tall, sir” create, in the first act especially, a lovely chiasmic form. Farce shines in Waller’s moments of brilliance – the harlequin of the Commedia del Arte, he is dancelike in his gestures, addressing his rival’s chest, not his head and twice receiving a glass of whisky to the face. Roote (Matt Gavan), as centrifugal force, is the tribal elder, whose versatility of oration draws out nicely the conflict between authority and megalomania. Thomas imbues her performance with comic irony – questioning her ranking on the femininity scale while juggling with histrionics. The addition of “hmm?” at the end of utterances gives her voice a lilting rhythm, lulling the audience with her magnetism.
This production casts a carnivalesque light on Pinter, turning the world upside down to create confusion. The problem of amnesia defines the comic side of Roote and creates lacunae in the narrative – evidence of the demise of order. Yet Roote is simultaneously ignorant and omniscient. His “I SHALL KNOW” makes him oracle- his clairvoyance predicting that Lush will indeed repeat “the snow has turned to slush” five times. This supernatural force is reinforced by his absence on the CCTV footage; he stays fixed while the others are split between their concrete and virtual selves. His image escapes surveillance confirming the elusiveness of his role. Identity is a slippery substance in the Hothouse, with characters having multiple epithets and the patients being identified only by numbers. There is a sense that individualism cannot exist within an institution. A powerful image of the individual sacrificed to the collective was the glowing mass of numbers revealed on the stage during the massacre. Patients 6459 and 6457, heavily discussed throughout the play, suddenly become insignificant in the myriad numerals. This weaving-in of the plays central theme into the actual material of the set is a testament to the innovation of its creators.
4 STARS
