Written for The Public Reviews
Water played at the Lyric Hammersmith in autumn 2007 and here it is again at the Tricycle in association with the Lyric. The themes this play tackles are still fresh and very now: climate change is something which can’t be ignored when can no longer escape the ever increasing frequency of freak weather conditions and natural disasters afflicting the planet.
So it is a disappointment that Water doesn’t engage with the urgency and immediacy of the issues it sets out to address. The project here is to reduce these global problems down to a personal level – and using this reduced scale, Filter hopes to show us that these issues impact on all of us and that it is within our power to make a change.
A man hears that his estranged father, a professor at a Canadian university, has died and he must travel to his funeral and meet his half-brother. A woman works for the coalition government and attends a summit on climate change in Canada; she is fighting for the creation of a law to enforce the reduction of emissions, but her commitment to her work is destroying her relationship with her cave-diving boyfriend. Both characters converge in the same hotel yet pass each other without ever connecting, but during the course of the play they learn important lessons about compromise and the need to understand others.
If it seems that this play is about everything but climate change then you need to read the programme which includes interviews with the cast, and a disquisitional couple of paragraphs on the purpose of the project, without which I’m not sure the play would have held together for me. There should be no need for textual backup – the play should be complete of itself and make sense without recourse to outside information. So they play germinated from the memory a cast member has of being in a boat on a lake with his father. This then leads to the idea of togetherness, someone’s idea to create a piece about ‘water’, and the politics of climate change. These all seem very disparate, and they are, until drawn together by the notion that water molecules are unique in that they don’t repel each other like most others. Like water molecules, people need to connect, see the bigger picture, and compromise their individuality for the greater good, just as countries across the world need to set aside their particular economic and political agendas and agree to cut emissions at their own expense. So far, so very liberal.
The message is admirable but how realistic is it? I came away feeling that this was rather a naïve way of looking at such an important global issue but I was engaged by the experience, even incensed, and so Filter did succeed in that respect. It must also be said that the performance was visually arresting and innovatively performed. The set, with its large flat screens and laptops, realistically conjured slick modernity and acted as a counterpoint to the more banal uses we put technology to such checking an online inbox on Match.com. The three actors switch between characters with consummate skill and, in a short amount of time, make us care about each one of them. Filter creates a unique and ingenious theatrical experience which doesn’t seek to hide the mechanics of theatre, but their special effects did all seem to come at the beginning of the play and then taper off making their efforts feel gimmicky at times.
I couldn’t not enjoy a performance which transformed the stage into a magical aquarium with floating balloon fish, but despite Filter’s efforts to produce a meaningful meditation on climate change, the stark contrast between the political and whimsically philosophical ultimately didn’t pay off.
Runs until 5th March
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