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A
Kind of Alaska Group: Pint-Sized Theatre |
| Shirley Dent | |
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The individual psyche is a bland, boring torture. It is certainly no place to be stranded alone, with all connection to the outside world severed. Harold Pinter's exploration of the disease made famous by Oliver Sacks' Awakenings (and probably more famous by Robin Williams and Robert de Niro in the film version of Sacks' book) is bland and strange and it needs to be. Encephalitis lethargica or sleeping sickness sinks its victims into a catatonic state, where the sufferer is aware of their surroundings but at the same time effectively locked out from that reality. Pint-Sized Theatre's production plays with the oddness and the strangeness of this state, both in the sufferer and the observer. The production took some time to grow on me, but when it did it brought the real focus of this play to the surface with a deft touch. At first I was unsure of the studied coldness, the bastard-son-of-Sigmund posture, of Tom Steward as Hornby the psychiatrist. I wanted Steph Pötschke as the awoken Deborah to stop intoning so much (she intones beautifully) and give more moments of quiet confusion, of whispered bitterness. Jo Royce as Pauline was never off pace and never hit a dud note. But when Deborah comes to a point of breaking, of reaching back into the bland, cold, featureless world that she has just broken free of, the 'Kind of Alaska' of the title, this little company could hold their own with Williams and de Niro (actually they could probably kick their Hollywood arses). Deborah's fear and panic, her excruciating realisation of where she has been, is just terrific. It is at this point that you understand that this play is not about what you think it is about. Pinter tells us that the individual consciousness is nothing and nowhere without the stimulus of external reality, without the social relationships that fill that world with meaning and colour. And you understand that A Kind of Alaska is not about us seeing into the strange psychic landscape of the catatonic but about the catatonic looking out to the vibrant life that proceeds without them. 1
July to 24 August.
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