The audience is split into two on either side of a kind of wasteland, half-ruin half-construction site. It's an apt setting for Silverland, Ben Davis's new play about the time before the end. And the end is near, judging by the headlines, which have not changed so much as intensified. Davis has got a bad dose of the apocalypse blues, the sense that things are winding up, or winding down, or both. What the play does is to take that feeling of finality and to ask it questions. A kind of magical realist exploration, an inkling made flesh. You may have felt this way about modern life. If you wanted to describe it you might say "it feels like the end of a bad relationship" or "the end of an ecstasy high where the world goes grey." These similes are realised in Silverland, they become the five narratives, woven like ribbons round a maypole.
Gabriel (Gideon Turner) and Sarah (Sophie Hunter) are the sort of couple you want to beat with a breeze block. We see their first chance meeting both admiring the sunset near one of her buildings: a docklands site turned from a living hub of trade into sterile flats for the rich. This new landmark blights the view of the Jacob's ladders the clouds form behind it - such is progress in this play. They may be bland, but their relationship is a tragic one, their professions are their temperaments: she can only react to her environment, he can only record it. They become a mirror facing a mirror with nothing in between, and their exchanges ("what are you thinking?"/ "I'm thinking about what you're thinking") though realistic, even familiar, are as bleak as anything in Endgame. The actors convince as a couple, to the extent that watching their bickering seems like an intrusion.
Dario (Sam Crane) and Mikey (Cary Crankson) are doing their best to make sense of a fractured reality. Both still gurning-high on ecstasy, trying to find their way back to the rave. The actors do well, moving their characters beyond a pet impression, though perhaps Crane just pips Crankson, noticing that it's only a short mince from rude to camp. Davis has an ear for their argot and his expression is not inhibited by its colour and brutality. The Thames, for instance, is full of "floating needles and corpses and shit". His handling of these characters is affectionate, their manic blather is full of resonance. "Freeze frame this moment" says Dario - the fact you can't is the ecstasy-sham in a nutshell, but also the problem with progress: you can't stay anywhere good for long. It's one of Davis's best tricks to approach his themes incidentally through dialogue, so if you can see it, it's there, if you can't he never said it. At times this can seem unnecessarily coy, particularly as he's quite willing to tackle them head on in action and exposition. As our hedonists realise their truth and then escape it with another pill, their pursuit of chemical happiness becomes something admirable, heroic even.
The next pair is Stockers (Tim Steed) and Cleo (Emmanuella Cole). Steed recalls Tim Roth, before he was shit, as this city boy in overdrive. His speeches are just the right side of caricature, more like a real personality that revels in its own nastiness. Such people do exist, I have seen them braying in packs outside All Bar One (or as Stockers pronounces it, "Albaroney") in Canary Wharf. Coles' extraordinary looks mean she doesn't need to do all that much to interest an audience, which is fine, given the ambiguity of her part. If anything her true nature, as revealed toward the end of the play, overshadows the rest of the role, making it hard for an actor to judge where to pitch the character - streetwalker or Nubian queen, she may be both symbolically; she cannot be both at once, on stage at least. I wonder too about the equivalence of Stockers and Cleo, "I am your shadow," she says. Is that that she gets fucked for money and he fucks people for money? It makes me want to ask the playwright if he can explain exactly what a hedge fund manager does.
Two more characters, performing largely in soliloquy, are less successful. Hugo Cox is forgettable, but perhaps intentionally so, as an office worker captured and interrogated for industrial secrets. He recovers quickly from this trauma and is soon bicycling back and forth across the stage sans helmet. He would have a worn a helmet wouldn't he? Or did his kidnappers take it off him? Right. Morven Macbeth as Caroline is in the doldrums, becalmed between emotions, waiting to hear news of her husband who has been lost at sea. There is room in this situation for a whole play so here we have a kind of shorthand. Having David's interrogators unheard and unseen works, and with some subtly, to explain a complex situation, but Caroline covers her ground in great strides. "How many girlfriends look forward to the call from the other woman's number?" is a question I might have pondered without prompting.
But this is nitpicking. As the play reaches its climax it becomes quite clear that I've never seen anything like this before. An attempt to move from everyday to the mythic, or from the everyday as we know it, to something both everyday and mythic. I think about the apocalypse. I think about it a lot. In some ways it must be quite like dying. Because, on the one hand, you'd have a sense that you were part of some kind of extraordinary event, an event particular to you, and on the other hand you'd still be engaged in something that everyone else was doing. It would be the ultimate lowest common denominator. And though by 4pm you might well be watching the descent of the New Jerusalem from heaven and the Lamb of God dividing the sheep from the goats, etc., etc., it would be quite possible that that morning you would have run out for milk, or had a row with your girlfriend, or got really messed up on drugs. When it comes it might be a bolt from the blue, or it might be something we've expected all along, like Gabriel's intuition that things weren't going to work out in his relationship. If all this sounds a little bleak, don't worry, Davis is no prophet of doom. As Dario might say, "back to the old school innit."
WF
Silverland is running at the Arcola until 10th June.
Arcola Theatre, 27 Arcola St, London E8 2DJ
Monday - Saturday 8pm, Saturday Matinee 3pm
Tickets 020 7503 1646 or from the Arcola Theatre website
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