Slowly & Hurts Given and Received – Riverside Studios, London

Writer: Howard Barker

Director: Hanna Berrigan and Gerrard McArthur

Reviewer: Honour Bayes

The Public Reviews Rating:

Four women look out with whitened faces in black silk death robes. Each portrays a different mask in the face of their annihilation, ranging from proud resolution to youthful fear as they wrestle with the question, are the ‘many’ really more important than the ‘one’?

Slowly, Howard Barker’s short and sharp first piece, pierces this dilemma beautifully and is artfully presented without judgement or easy resolution.

Under the pressure of a society bent on ritual suicide and an apocalyptic rumbling that fills Riversides’ echoey Studio One, the enormity of our heroines’ plight sits heavily on their artfully extended shoulders.

Under this mantle they begin to disintegrate; embodying a thousand little verbal flicks and cuts as they rip each other apart. These fine actresses are regal in their denigration and are orchestrated to near perfection by Hanna Berrigan. She has complete control of this tightly sprung score and her direction demands the same focus as Barker’s beautifully uncompromising aesthetic. But whilst, for the most part, the confident stillness that permeates this play is both chilling and arresting, on occasion Berrigan seems to panic that this minimalism is not enough, putting in superfluous nervous pieces of stage play.

However the whole thing feels vital and the plight and confusion of our four sacrifices comes across with palpable force. Vanessa Ackerman, Suzy Cooper, Megan Hall and Penelope McGhie embody Barker’s resplendent language in potent form, empowering the space with admirable control. Slowly truly is a painfully acute injection of The Wrestling School’s cruel exploration of individualism.

Hurts Given and Received is a decidedly saggier creature. Centred around the idea of amoral Art, which is fed by the sacrifice of innocents, it smacks too obviously and for too long of Barker’s own artistic ideology.

In a stylishly exaggerated setting by Tomas Leipzig, with heavy piles of papers poignantly hanging around the artist’s desk (like a noose around Bach’s neck) our victims walk through the valley of the shadow of death to give themselves up to Art. It is a futile journey and one that makes two-dimensional caricatures of them all.

Luckily it is held together by a sterling performance from Tom Riley as Bach, the selfish poet whose genius defies not only polite social niceties but more horrifyingly, tangible legal consequences as well. He is a bundle of frustrated energy, a childlike demon that torments and is tormented in equal measure.

There are interesting questions raised here that shine through the fog. Questions about personal responsibility, moral integrity vs artistic supremacy and social sacrifice in the face of god given talent. But Hurts Given and Received sits somewhere in a no-mans land with a narrative that never quite manages to attain the purity of thought that is so inherent in Slowly. Neither give you any answers, but in Hurts even the questions seem inexplicable.