Partly I think it's a source issue - with Twelfth Night I felt they were fighting against the play – it was limiting their creativeness. This is a piece the company have devised themselves - it's exploring themes and issues that obviously interests, fascinates, excites and inspires them and I think that shows. On top of that you still get the creativity and inventiveness that is frequently breathtaking but the focus remains on the emotional story at the heart of the play. Thankfully for me the stories and issues explored here are ones that I also feel deeply about.
It's been dressed up in some ways as a political/environmental play, you'll certainly find it classed in company with Greenland and The Heretic when it's mentioned - though I'm not sure that's truly where it's heart lies (and given I've not seen the other two yet, I cannot comment whether that's also true of them). With Water whilst the climate issue forms a backdrop for the story, I think instead this is a look at human nature and human interaction and human endeavour - water is more a theme, it unites the separate strands of the story. The production opens with a speech directed to the audience and staged as if it is a university lecture that provides the initial link of these two ideas - the connection between water and humanity - water is described, beautifully, as a sociable element like humanity. The same lecture also proposes that in order for us to tackle climate change we need to abandon our natural strive for further achievements and group together - in some sense to embrace mediocrity. I really wish a play text had been available for this as I'd love to pour over it again as I'm definitely not doing this speech justice. It’s a fantastic opening to the production.
The rest of the play is almost a series of explorations of this suggestion - of the tension between our desires for relationships vs. achievements - and it never chooses one side to support completely, instead showing us the damage of both. We don't know if Peter Roberts would have made massive leaps forward on global warming if he'd chosen that above family and we're not really shown if his choice made him happy in the end; but we're also given Claudia Ford, a government official working towards climate change, who as a contrast makes the opposite choice and the painful consequences she faces. In some ways it's a very bleak portrayal, though the ending struck me as almost hopeful. The final image is certainly wondrously beautiful.
I suspect that this refusal to choose a single answer may have lost the production some support. I’s one of those odd things that I’ve noticed particularly in reviews of productions of major issues like climate change or racism or the economy, that people feel frustrated at the lack of an easy answer. Which is understandable but an entirely unrealistic demand. The reason these are major issues is because there is no easy answer, they are huge sprawling complicated problems and expecting a playwright or performers or a journalist to provide solutions strikes me as strange. Personally I don't want them to, the things I've seen that have attempted to draw conclusions have felt extremely shallow and naive - instead I want to see and read things that make me think.
Water succeeds on all these scores, whilst also managing to be incredibly emotionally satisfying for me. On top of which you get the wonderful inventiveness of Filter. Their approach to theatre is almost Brechtian in some ways, it never seeks to hide or deny that it is by nature theatrical – the nuts and bolts of how they do things are openly on display – with both the stage manager and sound designer, Tim Phillips, visible on stage. It’s an approach I really enjoy and I think they use it differently than Brecht – rather than creating distance or barriers between the audience and performers, I think here it’s used to invite the audience in, there’s a willing collusion between those on and off stage.
It also allows you to properly appreciate the company’s cleverness. Whether it’s the way they create the sound of rain by typing on a keyboard or whether it’s them bouncing a tennis ball on the floor whilst the other performers’ mime the match in progress – there’s a certain amount of revelling in seeing how it’s done. My favourite ‘effect’ and perhaps one of the simplest, was the way Ferdy Roberts used the symbolic moment of putting on a pair of glasses and jacket to switch between his very different roles as Peter and Graham – both his and the other performers, Oliver Dimsdale and Victoria Moseley, performances were excellent.
It was a highly enjoyable and impressive production on all levels and I’m definitely now looking forward to my next Filter piece, Silence.
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