Where were you on the day of the great Crucible fire? The day that a young woman named Bear stood on a round table outside Starbucks and proclaimed herself the reincarnation of King Arthur? The day the revolution began?
One of the great theatrical success stories in South Yorkshire has been the establishment of Sheffield People’s Theatre, a community company founded to celebrate the Crucible’s 40th anniversary, whose initial project, Lives in Art, was a dystopian parable about what might have happened if the theatre had never been built. Now, in association with site-specific specialists Slung Low, the company has created a vision of the near-future, in which the theatre is torched by security forces and violent protests break out in the city centre.
The logistics alone are staggering: utilising Slung Low’s trademark technology of headphones and radio transmitters, the audience are evacuated from the smouldering auditorium, witness a suicide bombing in the square outside, and are ultimately kettled in the gardens behind the town hall by a furious mob wielding flares and molotov cocktails.
It’s on an even grander scale than Blood and Chocolate, the company’s first world war re-enactment on the streets of York. Yet whereas Mike Kenny’s script for that project was a model of thematic development and clarity, the Arthurian references of James Phillips’s drama become self-defeatingly opaque. It’s a neat idea that a disaffected generation might adopt the codes of a new age of chivalry; and director Alan Lane is undeniably skilled at creating a state of emergency. The problem is that the headsets, rather than making the narrative clearer, have the effect of turning the audience into a body of automatons within a combat game, whose rules are never adequately explained. It keeps you on edge, though you wish the adrenaline surge could be engendered as much by character and situation as by the force of the explosions.
- At Crucible theatre, Sheffield, until 18 July. Box office: 0114-249 6000.
