Mile End at Southwark Playhouse

Mile End at Southwark Playhouse

21 July, 2008
by: John Ellingsworth

I don't know what to say about the decision to situate a play about a man being pushed under a train in a theatre under an active railway line. There were times when the sound of carriages passing overhead might have been a sound effect, or might have been real – theatrically the production probably benefited, but what makes the situation a bit queasy is that Mile End is a play taking inspiration from the widely-reported death of Christophe Duclos, who was pushed off an Underground platform by Stephen Soans-Wade in September 2002. The story was picked up by the papers at the time because, before it all happened, Soans-Wade had been trying to get himself sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

So what newish company/collective Analogue have done with Mile End is tell in parallel the stories of Duclos (renamed Alex) and Soans-Wade (renamed Michael), or tell, at least, the stories of two people very much like them in the disastrous entwined trajectories of their lives. There are two ways they hold the two characters together. The first is by stagecraft: there is confident use of projection in tandem with two moving screens (which are on rollers and work as the Tube train doors), and the company has a great way of tilting or rotating the audience's plane of perspective. In a really great sequence Michael is driven by hideous and overloud downstairs music to claw at the floorboards of his flat. He pries them up and an animation of floorboards being drawn back is projected onto the moving screens, which then draw aside to reveal a birds-eye-view of a man in an armchair in the flat below – the audience looking down on him as the back of the chair is elevated parallel to the stage floor. It comes off brilliantly.

The flexibility of the design allows Mile End to run its narratives concurrently: Michael and Alex can be on stage at the same time, oblivious to each other, walking through the city, being obscured or revealed by the screens that move fluidly around them. The whole show is technically very impressive, but also astute at matching the technique to the emotional life of the piece - in this case the perspective shifts and impermanence of the set configuration becoming more disorientating and violent as the symptoms of Michael's illness begin to assert themselves.

The second way that Mile End holds Alex and Michael together is by Fate. Alex has a girlfriend, Kate, and their scenes are essentially little relationship dramas interrupted by Alex's premonitions of his own death. He is in one dream sequence fixed in agony on the bed while a long red ribbon is drawn seemingly from his mouth - this ribbon then becoming a red scarf that Kate buys the next day. I think people that react badly against Mile End (it was shown in early form a few years ago, emerged fully formed in Edinburgh in 2007, won a lot of attention, and is now on a national mini-tour of which Southwark Playhouse is just one part) are reacting against this, seeing it as a crude or unjustified activation of the Greek tragedy archetype.

I am not so sure. There are times, certainly, when the writing overreaches itself in its desire for narrative and thematic circularity, but it seems to me that ultimately the company are just trying to find a way to communicate the reality and inner life of a person so gripped by his illness that he no longer feels he has a choice. In other words I think they were honestly trying to understand what it was like, for Stephen Soans-Wade. And that one way to do that was to create a character who would live and share the nightmare of his violent ideations. It works, most of the time. I would recommend you to see it. It is not exploitative. It is sad.

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John Ellingsworth