Location: The Door, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Birmingham
Dates: Tuesday 4th – Saturday 8th September.
Price: From £10 per ticket.
Strong females fighting Dystopian futures are all the rage these days. Between Katniss Everdean in the far future of The Hunger Games, to June raging against the system in the near future of The Handmaid’s Tale and any number of similar stories inbetween, women fighting against their subjugation is a familiar and well worn theme.
With this we have Penelope Skinner’s “Meek”. Set in a fictional Scandinavian country, Irene gets dumped by her married lover, writes a song about heartbreak whose lyrics may or may not have blamed some of this on the current regime and their religious laws. She performs the song in her local coffee shop and before you can say “stasi” she’s anonymously reported and banged up for her heinous crime.
The play picks up in the hours after she was first arrested and in a series of short, sharp scenes the above is all laid out to us. Most of the initial exposition is with her highly-strung best friend Anna, who comes to visit her, in defiance of her unseen husband’s wishes. The more detailed and rather grim ramifications are discussed with her lawyer, Gudrun, a stoic, matter of fact figure in the play, who may be using Irene’s situation to her own ends.
The stage is stark and oppressive, shadowed and sparingly lit. The sound design is spare and subtle, but lends itself well to the darkness in between scenes that it inhabits. Scarlett Brookes, The actress playing Anna is probably the stand out player here. Irene is played by Shvorne Marks who works her lines well, showing despair in the early stages, working her way up to hopefulness in the latter. I would have liked to have seen more emotion in the performance of Amanda Wright in the role of Gudrun, but perhaps that’s the point of her character: cold, matter of fact and to the point.
It’s an interesting and thoughtful play, with a message about hope and heroism from despair. It speaks about mistakes and decisions made in haste, and on a wider range, it joins the chorus of current commentary regarding tolerance from all sides and the state of politics and the extreme end of where some paths may lead.
Meek is running until 8th September, with tickets starting from £10. Its running in The Door theatre, which is a smaller studio in The Rep, giving a really intimate performance, the stage and it’s players practically on top of the audience. With a runtime of just over an hour, its a bite size piece of theatre with an important message about where society might be heading for if left unchecked.
Photo’s courtesy of The Rep.