Arlington
Writer: Enda Walsh
Director: Anna Houston
Seymour Centre
August 7-24, 2024
Irish playwright Enda Walsh’s Arlington presses the boundaries of theatre with a multimedia performance accompanied by aggressive lighting and sound effects. The production’s staging demands and discomposes, shocks and bewilders but the play’s most discomforting proposition is that the audience assemble their own sense from the triptych of contemporary anguish offered to it. The process is thrilling.
While modern writers depict the uneasy aspects of modern existence they are keen on mining the human condition, no matter how desperate, for elements of hope. Phrases like “the enduring human spirit” or “human persistence in the face of catastrophe” proliferate, and we accept them, yearning as we do for affirmation. With the rise of so-called “reality television” we sit in front of our TVs watching the edited tribulations of our fellow citizens with equanimity induced by the belief there’s no place like home with two bathrooms and a rumpus room for the kids. Perhaps the fascinating 90 minutes that is Arlington could be read as a critique of our optimism.
The situation of Arlington’s three characters, each with their own episode, taking place in an impersonal waiting room, resembles that of individuals participating in a compulsory reality show. Citizens of a “lower” kind are captured, imprisoned, put under constant surveillance, and quarried, it seems, for their memories and dreams. Possibly, for the entertainment of the “keepers” – noting a distinction made between “the keepers” and “the kept” – and the Young Man is encouraged to make his recollections of his uncle’s wedding more “entertaining”. The comparison with our companionable laptop that knows more about us than we know about ourselves is apparent – data we ourselves have handed over – and even more so with AI sucking up data universally for ill-defined purposes.
For the interviewer/recorder sitting amongst a barrage of technological equipment on the other side of an invisible wall, it is their job and they are not expected to identify with their subject. However, the Young Man (Jack Angwin) who becomes Isla’s interviewer is new and when he comically reveals his discomfort at the sight of naked feet, a forbidden connection is made. When Isla (a very appealing Phaedra Nicolaidis) narrates her lovely dream of walking through the woods, realised through projection but invoked through her gift with words, the Young Man listens in wonder. The vulnerable Isla who yearns for intimacy – she has made herself a life-size doll – senses her time in the waiting room is over, and her future is to be moved to a room in one of the towers – a potent symbol of isolation – she has seen from her window.
The second episode or middle image of the triptych suggests the possible fate of the “lower ones”, once detained. A Young Woman (Emma Harrison) prowls her drab room rubbing along the wall like a tiger in its enclosure, expressing her frustration and despair through a powerfully choreographed and performed dance. We feel the wildness of her creative energy, her moments of desire for artistic freedom and eventually the heaviness of her decision. Can we imagine what it will be like for the fragile Isla with her dream of a loving connection and poetic gift?
While the third image, that of the tortured Young Man as fodder for the unfeeling Supervisor (Georgina Symes) is “real” in terms of the play, the denouement is debatable. Does it happen or is it that hope leads us astray and makes us believe that the entrapment and isolation of humanity by technological omniscience and consequent control of cultural direction would be impossible? We should know by now that it is not.
Arlington is an exciting production of a remarkably rich play. There are many possible directions and mercifully director Anna Houston, while she has her own committed vision, has left us free to respond according to our own perception of the contemporary world. Praise is due to the creative crew, Kate Beere (set, costume), Aron Murray (lighting, video designer) and Steve Toulmin (composer, sound designer) for an exciting realisation of Walsh’s nightmarish dystopia.
