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Light’s fantastic as night life is sent back to stage
NIGHTFALL
Camden People’s Theatre
THE summer solstice: a celebration of the longest day or a delirious attempt to keep the dark dragons of the sky at bay, depending on whose version you hear.
In The Golden Bough, JG Frazer described it as “the great turning point in the sun’s career” – like Pearl Harbour for Ben Affleck – “when the luminary… stops and thenceforth retraces his steps down the heavenly road.”
It made primitive man so anxious that he lit huge bonfires to try to rekindle the waning sun and to this day it gives hippies an excuse to dress like druids and take drugs.
No chaplets of mugwort and vervain were visible at the Camden People’s Theatre on Saturday for the Sprint Festival’s one-off voyage into darkness. Instead, the ritual went as follows. At the crepuscular hour of 9pm, a population of theatre-goers mustered in the Hampstead Road auditorium. Babes in arms and students were admitted at a discount.
In the centre of the stage stood a table, on which a litany of tools was arrayed.
Four young folk, fleet of foot and tight of jean, surrounded it.
Preparations were made. Around the neck of the first intrepid explorer, a lux reader (light meter) was hung, complemented with a day-glo waistcoat, miner’s headlamp and walkie-talkie.
Then, one person at a time, they set out into the fading evening to relay commentary on the world outside back to their audience and fellow actors in the theatre. The amusing banality of the initial observations gave way to earnest poetics, sometimes a little overcooked.
But Nightfall’s faults were often its strengths too: the sense of different lives under the same lucid sky, of the feelings evoked by particular stages of light, continue to resonate.
Bristol company The Special Guests have an assuredness on the stage that belies their years, and there are the sparks here of a troupe that might yield great things in the future, with the blessing of the great Sun God, of course.
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