Haruki Murakami would have called it What I Talk About When I Talk About Weightlifting. The title chosen by playwright Stef Smith is The Deadlift. Like Murakami’s book on running, this dreamy meditation on a trip to the gym switches between the physical and the metaphysical, capturing a weightlifter’s meandering thoughts and juxtaposing them with the fleshy reality of joints, hamstrings and shoulder blades.
Drifting and poetic, hers is the first episode of Earwig, a series of six “audio drama podcasts” directed by Finn den Hertog for Glasgow’s Tron theatre. The brainchild of composer Danny Krass, the 15-minute instalments are designed for headphones, their sonic landscapes swirling around you, all echoes, percussive effects and ambient sound.
The Deadlift is a case in point. The words of Ashley Smith, playing an experienced weightlifter, repeat like a musical refrain. They underscore the voice of Renee Williams, playing the newbie, amazed to find her body adjusting to an unfamiliar fitness regime. While Alon Ilsar’s free-jazz drumming morphs into the clatter of the exercise room, the women’s thoughts bubble up into speech.
In the era of social distancing, the gym represents a kind of collective isolation. For the playwright, exercise is a metaphor for releasing life’s weights: “I lift to lighten the burden of being.”
Leading us into a gothic fairytale, Hannah Lavery’s There Is Still Something Yet to Discover is an elliptical evocation of Baba Yaga, the supernatural figure from Slavic folklore. Slippery and impressionistic, this second episode is a difficult piece to get your head around; even after three listens I can’t say I understand it. But it’s beautifully done, its themes about the responsibility of motherhood and the insidious threats of racism and homophobia made ominous by Julia Reidy’s glacial guitar and Krass’s rumbling score.
It’s fascinating, too, to hear the characteristically rambunctious dialogue of Johnny McKnight set against Krass’s languid electric guitar. The text of the third episode, Tikka, is all sharp-tongued wisecracks as a mother (Ann Louise Ross) ticks off her son (Robbie Jack) for being too nervous to say he’s in love. But the music brings out the sad undertow of lockdown life, creating a touching evocation of a world of reduced horizons where everything stands or falls on the success of a homemade curry.
