Theatre company, Hydrocracker, prove Harold Pinter is still extremely powerful and genuinely terrifying says Catherine Love.
Site-specific theatre is rarely as urgent or as disquieting as it is in the hands of Hydrocracker, who make a sound case for the continuing relevance of Harold Pinter’s work by putting together five of his short political plays – One for the Road, The New World Order, Precisely, Mountain Language and Press Conference – and ingeniously weaving them into a grim tour of state oppression.
Led on a disorientating and disturbing journey through the bowels of Shoreditch Town Hall, audience members are lined up against walls, broken into small groups and guided down dimly lit corridors. Crammed into tiny chambers with Hydrocracker’s utterly, unsettlingly convincing performers, there is quite literally nowhere to go. As a sobbing young woman desperately begs us for help, we are no longer mere spectators.
By keeping audiences small and tightly packed, Hydrocracker raise questions about both audience and performer interaction and about the relationship between individual and state. We are spitting distance from the performances we bear witness to and also from one another. At its best this heightens the unease, and at its worst it threatens to break it. Ellie Jones’ clever production has taken some risks, and rightly so, but ones that sometimes unfortunately punctuate the compelling action with moments of awkwardness.
Audiences are fickle creatures and performers here are dependent to a degree on the behaviour of those watching, which is inevitably an unpredictable game. Some spectators are reluctant to be drawn into the scenario, while others stifle nervous giggles. What is most striking, though, is the absence of dissent. We all allow ourselves to be quietly shepherded from atrocity to atrocity, never a voice raised in objection. This is what is expected and indeed encouraged by the experience, but it also makes for a disturbing metaphor for the calm, complicit acquiescence of the general public. As an audience, our own actions themselves become chilling.
The true terror of these pieces, and one that Hydrocracker have highlighted by immersing audiences in an alien yet oddly familiar world, is the political as well as the physical closeness of the scenes depicted. Little has changed since Pinter first wrote these furious political cries – one might even argue that the situation has only worsened. A prisoner’s orange jumpsuit screams Guantanamo Bay, while implicit fears are raised even closer to home. Characters refer repeatedly to keeping the world ‘clean for democracy’, a rhetoric that chimes uncomfortably with our own government’s statements about protecting the nation from terrorism. This, Hydrocracker seem to be saying, is the ‘protection’ that our state might give us.
As the doors finally open onto the outside world, what we take with us is a sense of unsettling complicity. In an immersive theatrical world that feels all too real, Hydrocracker have produced one of the most uncompromisingly, unrelentingly bleak interpretations of Pinter’s stark vision. The audience may be allowed to leave the dank, gloomy passages of Shoreditch Town Hall, but there is no escape from Hydrocracker’s dark glimpse down the rotten corridors of power.
The New World Order is an off-site production presented by The Barbican and runs at Shoreditch Town Hall until 11th December.
Image Credit: Matthew Andrews
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