Ou Est Pierre? A Dream Play

Where indeed is Pierre? Furthermore, who is Pierre? And who is looking for him? And why?

In the fabulous production at The Vaults of Strindberg's A Dream Play, the question is posed in ludic and ever more exaggerated manner by an ostensibly French woman situated in what might be a kitchen set for a rudimentary breakfast or what we might take to be a rather down at heel bistro. Either way she is accompanied and indeed prompted by increasingly urgent cello refrains. Her desperation is palpable. The precise focus for her question much less so.

The play won't yield easy answers, as Strindberg himself said of it:

"The characters split, double, multiply, evaporate, condense, dissolve and merge. But one consciousness rules them all: the dreamer's; for him there are no secrets, no inconsistencies, no scruples and no laws. He does not judge or acquit, he merely relates; and because a dream is usually painful rather than pleasant, a tone of melancholy and compassion for all living creatures permeates the rambling narrative."

The evening has begun listening to Laura Moody playing cello whilst people that we gradually come to recognise as members of the cast mingle with the audience and listen to our conversations. Who is who is not apparent and not intended to be. The sense is that we are being lulled as we start out on our dream journey being met by the gods who have descended to witness and experience human life and in particular its pain manifest through the everyday, the familiar and the familial in particular through marriage and its discontents.

Initially Agnes (the daughter of the gods) cannot speak but only utter guttural sounds. She touches people and looks surprised, occasionally pleased, almost satisfied. Then we move inside.

Using the arches and spaces below Waterloo Station as a setting for a peripatetic production is a stroke of some genius because they allow for the kind of perspectival shifts from crowded intimacy to long vistas exactly as in a dream. The cavernous spaces, the shadows, the echoes, the rumblings from the tubes and trains all add to the sense of dislocation.

A couple argue in their bedroom as we stand around as observers, the dialogue interrupted periodically by a man constrained by a chain round his waist attached to an unseen post or person, who enters to hand over notes. He cannot speak. His messages look urgent. We don't know their content. We have heard muffled shouts and arguments and sounds from beyond the room.

There are bravura sequences in which we sit as children cross legged in front of Miss having to finish lines in a doggerel song - and then the lights go out. Altogether.

In such sequences, presided over by Laura Moody looking for all the world like Athena with a cello, the strokes of the bow at times almost guide the pace and the diction of the characters and at others seem to act as a refrain of what has been said.  We are never sure in the dream world whether we are actors or authors.

At the culmination, Agnes 'dies' reflecting on the pain that she has seen and experienced; a pain for which she has compassion. And whilst we can rightly see this play as a monumental achievement which presages the explicitly surreal; at root it is actually the humanity that shines through. We all dream. There is still no answer to the problems of life. But we can empathise with the plight of our fellows.

When the cello strikes up again at the end of the play one senses that this is just one cycle of the dream. Recurrence is the theme. It will all happen again and again. Subtly different depending on the dreamer but running over the same traumas and problems and seeking a resolution that is always just out of sight, just out of reach.

El Sur: A Triumph In Chiaroscuro

'The South' is a 1983 film by Victor Erice - the director of the spellbinding Spirit of the Beehive. Both films deal with aspects of Spanish history and in particular the consequences of the civil war. El Sur is set in the very north of Spain in a deliberately damp and cold landscape, the family around whom the story is spun living in a house on the edge of town joined to the rest of the area by a long, straight road which is referred to as the border.

The father used to live in the South, in Sevilla, but left for reasons that are shown to be both personal and political. The effect of the fracture in the family, in politics, and in the his way of life is reflected in the way that characters are frequently lit half in the light and half in shadow. The expertise with which this contrasted light and shadow is used throughout the film is little short of astonishing.

This contrast can be seen as reflecting both the sun and light of Andalucia and the dreary winter in Galicia (or similar); of the period before and after the civil war but most profoundly in what it conveys about the essential unknowability of the other. Even the doting daughter comes to realise that her father has many secrets which revolve around his former life in the South.

Throughout there is a feeling of inhabiting liminal space and peering into obscurity. Scenes emerge only gradually into light, frequently lit from one side in a deliberately painterly style and even then as likely to fade away into nothingness as to become clear.

The obscurity of what has happened is mirrored in the quasi magical powers of dowsing and hypnotism with which the father is suggested to be endowed. In one sequence at the daughter's first communion, he appears from the shadows at the back of the church to which he then returns having promised not to 'go away'.

The daughter of the family acts as the centre of gravity seeking to understand her father as her mother retreats further and further away. In one sequence she hides under the bed and refuses to be found thinking that if she retreats into silence like the others it will shake them into behaving differently. Instead, the father appears more and more of a revenant; someone who is in many senses dislocated. His refusal to go back to the South but the increasingly clear emotional bonds that it holds for him ultimately conflicting to tragic effect.

The music heightens this sense of dislocation. The wondrous piano music of Granados is a modernist take on traditional Spanish forms; Ravel in minor key melancholy mode adds a sense of muted but simultaneously profound interiority.

As a film it is simply magical; a work of subtle genius that conveys huge amounts through small inflections. At the very end the daughter does indeed leave on a visit - it is clear that she is coming back - for the South. The visit, it is suggested, will aid her return to health. More profoundly, it will perhaps start to mend the wider fractures that have been evident throughout.