Naima Khan reviews the Almeida Festival headliner, Mass Observation, a show inpsired by attempts to observe a changing nation in 1930s UK.
Kudos to designer Jamie Vartan for making detailed, unrelenting surveillance look simultaneously cute an sinister. He does it with typewriters and shelves of cardboard boxes that make the headquarters for the 1937 Mass Observation organisation seem like a granny's living room and a projection of a computer screen filled with streaming details, think. The low-budget social research initiative headed by Tom Harrison relied on volunteers to record the actions and attitudes of the masses.
But in Inspector Sand's show at Almeida Festival, the company take their cue from the process of their source material by blatantly recording their observations of the individual including audience members (from their clothes to their fidgeting habits) and attempting to make a statement about the world today. While potentially brilliant, at this stage of its development, it doesn't live up to its premise.
The show's first central character is mousy, endearing Marsha Hewitt who volunteers as an observer just before the coronation of George VI and falls for the organisation's director, Tom. Sweetly, her observations move beyond movement and clothing, she sees anxiety and hope and what we learn of Marsha we learn in a flood of revealed information they way she sees and records the world. Her small part on Earth is highlighted excellently in Mass Observation and played by Amanda Lawrence, she is quite unforgettable. But while she deserves her place on stage, it's not becuase she's done anything that remarkable and that's one of the show's strengths.
Decades later she is even more unremarkable as an elderly woman, mute and immobile (superb phyisical performances all round) in a retirement home where she meets Tom's grandson. Married with a kid and in the midst of organising a Jubilee street party via mobile phone, Nigel finds himself in the age of information without a signal. He serves to show us the way we record things now, kind of. He sort of reveals our dependency on having everything at our fingertips and in a small way he makes me think of...well not very much at all. Given the superbly rich source material Inspector Sands have in Mass Observation and what it might say about the mood of a nation and our increasing commercialism, I don't really understand why they veer from it so much, only to paint a picture of an uninteresting contemporary cock-up?
Nigel learns things slowly and while the individuality of everyone who surrounds him is apparent to the audience, he's blind to it and certainly doesn't appreciate it. There's a metaphor in that but it's also a bit moralistic and two dimensional. The change in tone and setting is handled clumsily with over-reliance on the interval, which is made necessary by stretching this show out two two hours excluding interval. With a lot of trimming and streamlining, this show could be as good as Vartan's design.
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