Noises off ... Rehearsals at the National Theatre for The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other. Photograph: Sarah Lee
So the National Theatre today opens a Peter Handke play without a single word of speech? Who needs words these days, I'm tempted to ask of a cultural landscape in which some of the most thrilling moments of late have found a substitute for language, of which the supreme one, of course, is silence. Handke's play, by contrast, makes its own, highly specific noise, and one can only imagine the demands that have been placed on the sound designer, Christopher Shutt, to provide an aural accompaniment to 90-minutes-plus of stage directions at their most precise. Nor is this strategy unique to the European avant-garde: Michael Frayn's delicious theatre-themed farce, Noises Off, devotes the second of its three acts to a sustained sequence of disasters backstage, the result a slapstick ballet that takes place with scarcely a word.
The inclusion of Handke's play is characteristic of a National Theatre repertoire of late that has found all sorts of alternatives to words: Katie Mitchell's Women of Troy, for instance, deliberately renders unintelligible sizeable sections of its Euripidean source, and while War Horse may have been nominated for an Olivier for best play, surely it's the puppeteering one remembers, not author Nick Stafford's text. (Indeed, I hear that the script is being tweaked in advance of the production's return to the Olivier auditorium later this year.)
Handke, it must be said, was surely on to something, regardless of the rather dismissive response from New York of a better-known play of his, Offending the Audience, that has just been revived Off Broadway. (This one does contain words.)
The abandonment of language can reap real dividends, both in the theatre and elsewhere. The celebrated opening sequence of Oscar hopeful There Will Be Blood tells us more about the determination of the film's central character, Daniel Plainview, than the ensuing two hours of Paul Thomas Anderson's exceedingly smart script: There in embryo is the commitment bordering on psychosis that will come to consume Daniel Day-Lewis's oil magnate. And film, of course, is ideally poised to make a virtue of silence, the camera picking up at close quarters what playwrights generally are compelled to spell out. Small wonder that Samuel Beckett all these years after his death still seems ahead of his time in his ability to pare speech away, in the process uncovering - as many a Pinter pause has, as well - what George Eliot in Middlemarch memorably called "the noise on the other side of silence." Isn't Ruth's smile at the close of The Homecoming, newly revived at the Almeida, every bit as potent as all the male verbal bluff and bluster that has preceded it?
Music, perhaps paradoxically, can make a virtue of silence, too. Arguably the most rending passages of Peter Grimes are the Four Sea Interludes and the immensely charged spaces between them, which give us time to reflect on a hero at increasingly horrific odds with the community around him. And I've long admired British concert-goers' willingness to let a piece play itself out in full, the silence at many a composition's close an integral part of its overall affect. (In New York, everyone leaps in to applaud, thereby negating the impact.) So it is with some surprise that one points to the LPO concert performance at the Royal Festival Hall on February 2 of the Symphonie Pathetique. Scarcely had the conductor Vladimir Jurowski let that work's dying musical fall take hold of a packed and quiet house before the lone mobile phone of the evening exploded the silence, going off at absolutely the worst possible moment as Jurowski stiffened in response. The intrusion into the 21st-century soundscape of the mobile phone: now there's a topic for Handke should the hour we knew nothing of each other become the moment at which, Munch-like, we all want to scream.
