Sometimes life takes over and it whooshes me up into a conundrum of very unimportant stuff like politics with a little ‘p’. Every so often I give into my propensity to over analyze the trivial stuff and forget about the bigger picture.
That’s when I take time out, and do the unthinkable. That’s when I take a break and go to a theatre to immerse myself in someone else’s intricate thoughts, over articulation and fertile imagination.
This time I went to watch a rehearsal preview of ‘Tender Napalm’ at St. James Cavallier.
‘Tender Napalm’ is Philip Ridley’s fiery and yet chilling rendition of love and hate. I found it savagely funny and yet so deeply sensual that at times I had to look away to recompose myself.
Bettina Paris and Andre Agius are the only two people in this play, and when I say the only two people I mean that as far as they’re concerned, there’s absolutely nobody else; not even the audience.
These two young actors are so talented that they’ll have you enthralled, confused and elated all at the same time. Add this to Toni Attard’s impeccable direction, and they look like are feeling every single word they say deep in their soul, like a kiss on the nape or a punch in the gut.
The two actors could be boxers sizing each other up before a fight, but we soon figure out that they are in fact lovers who spend the whole duration of the play circling around each other with pin point precision and acrobatic timing.
They interrupt each other all the time because they are both worried that the other will overtake their version of the truth. To keep their story alive and believable, they keep reinventing it, feeding off each other’s cues always trying to take the upper hand with a ferocious competition.
Sounds familiar? Don’t we all have our own version of what really happens in love? Don’t we all fight to make sure that our version remains the official one, even though in truth, even that is a made up out of our version of the facts.
The narrative is certainly not straightforward because the one who controls it holds the power, but by the end, it transpires to be unimportant, especially when compared to the underlying discourse, which examines the violence of love, and its uncomfortably close relationship with hate.
The narrative moves backwards from what looks like the end of a relationship to the very first moment it started. Throughout, Ridley’s words burn and not just between the sheets, but also inside the mind of the audience because it exposes those secret places that we keep so deeply hidden even more than perverse sexual acts.
Words are the weapons that this play uses to express love, consolation and ultimately even castration. But what did I expect from a play called “Tender Napalm”? Napalm is a mixture of a thickening agent and petroleum used in chemical warfare.