Review: CONTAINER at New Diorama Theatre

Five musician performers stand before the audience, microphones and music stands at the ready and a few weirdly incongruous props (more of that in a moment). They begin talking over each other in rhythmic cadences, uttering words, repeating them, repeating them and over-lap-lapping-lapping-each-lapping-each-other as we journey into the strangely hypnotic territory of polyphony. In a world seemingly consumed by a multiplicity of international crises, how does one begin to convey the mundanities of humanitarian horror? Words and phrases speak of bodies, rape, missing hands, tying-up. The effect is at once beguiling and grotesque, alienating yet compelling.

Predominantly a vocal performance the piece’s interdisciplinary creators Alan Fielden, Tim Cape, Jemima Yong, Ben Kulvichit and Clara Potter-Sweet, (supported by Kendell Foster) present a musical symbiosis which involves guitars, drums, keyboards, accordion, bass and even what looked like an Irish tin whistle.

During the course of proceedings there are a number of occasions when the group re-set the playing area. Several times, they lift one of the trunk lids and carefully position two mice on its edge. Both are clad in miniature armour, one of them is holding a spear. In the dark of the wing space on the shadowy periphery of the playing area, players give the mice voices. The first of the two notable stories conveyed in these moments, involves a knight returning from the crusades. Consumed with guilt about the barbarism he has inflicted in his victory over the Muslims, he consults a priest who absolves him as a blessed saviour of Christianity for murdering the heathen. The knight cuts off the priest’s head [cue stifled inner cheering among audience members]. Another involves Iraqi and Turkish refugees crossing the border into Bulgaria, through Serbia and on into Hungary where, due to the skittish nature of the driver (who abandons the vehicle at a lay-by in the heat of summer on hearing police sirens), seventry-one human beings, men women and a baby die and putrefy in the confines of a cramped container vehicle.

Much that is presented is sobering and unsettling, but the manner of delivery almost deadpan and matter-of-fact. There’s something studenty and over earnest in the mix which despite the good intentions, pervades a slightly lecturing and didactic whiff. Self conscious cleverness has always been supremely difficult to disguise and despite the troupe’s determination to be perceived as wholly and completely sincere, there is an ever so slight leak of pomposity about the evening.