'Vessel' review or 'Does it sound different in here?'

Vessel, Sue MacLaine
Battersea Arts Centre, 9th November 2018
Written for The Guardian 

Four peaceful-looking women sit on chairs in a cramped stage space. Grainy light seeps through three small windows. An orange screen above the women is filled with a stream of projected words, which the women recite. The phrasing is fractured, overlapping and untethered. Glimmers of meaning occasionally wriggle free, but meaning isn’t really the point. Vessel is a chance for the audience to step away from reality and get lost, perhaps escape, together.

This is Sue MacLaine’s follow-up piece to Can I Start Again Please, which explored the limits of language, particularly when talking about abuse. Vessel focuses on the power that language exerts, and the choices we might make to undermine that power. It’s based on the medieval practice of anchoritism, in which women chose to live locked away in religious seclusion. Vessel shuts us away in a similar sort of space; the result is a show that feels more like meditation than theatre.

Gender dynamics, politics, corruption, greed and countless other contemporary concerns are all obliquely addressed. But MacLaine’s script is so wilfully obscure that this becomes a physical experience rather than an intellectual one. We watch the words on Giles Thacker’s projections gather and drop down to the bottom of the screen, and it feels like a release. We watch the calm and focused actors, and listen in particular to Angela Clerkin’s lucid delivery and Owen Crouch’s oozing sound design, and the brain begins to slow and the body relax.

Gradually we start to listen for the feeling that words create, rather than their meaning. Political strongholds are discussed and words such as “surplus”, “deficit” and “commodity” sound hollowed out and cold. Greed is touched on and language stretches out; compassion is explored and the words feel warm and tangible.

It’s a strange but quietly revealing piece, and also pretty hard work. Vessel is beautifully conceived and tough to watch. It requires an unusual double state: hyperawareness coupled with total relaxation. It won’t be for everyone, but I enjoyed the experience of (sort of) letting go.