Edward Bond’s writing makes me uncomfortable. I find it awkward, sometimes frustrating and often incomprehensible. A bit like life itself, I guess.
Bond does not make things easy for the actors either. His plays do not give actors much possibility in building character. At least certainly not in the way most actors have been trained to do.
Moreover, Bond’s plays are not vehicles for virtuoso acting, which is possibly why he seems more content nowadays to write for community theatres in the UK rather than the West End.
It is clear, however, that director, Chris Cooper, has a solid understanding of the underlying themes in Bond’s writing and has enabled the four actors to tease out the subtleties of the writing with every gesture and inflection of their voice.
The play is split into two parts –the first part takes the audience to an unnamed war zone where Harry, a western soldier (played by Malcolm Galea), and a civilian woman (Simone Spiteri) from opposing factions meet. Both are victims of war, both are cradling babies in their arms and both are desperately in search of water for their babies. The meeting, however, is not one between equals for the soldier wields a gun, a symbol of power and oppression. This allows the soldier to ensure that it is only his baby that gets to enjoy the water from a discarded water bottle found among the ruins.
As the scene unfolds, the audience discovers that the woman’s child has actually been dead for days and the only reason she wanted water was so that she could bathe him before burial. The woman’s haunting plea to the soldier, “Water for my baby”, is, however, only met with Harry’s cruel insistence, “You started this”.
The second part takes place several years later and set in Harry’s apartment. The scene opens with Harry’s wife, Ruth (Magdalena van Kuilenberg), returning from a visit to the supermarket laden with groceries. As she places the groceries on the kitchen table, she is accosted by Sig (Andre Agius) who lives in the apartment above and who brazenly asks her to run away with him. It is immediately clear that both Ruth and Sig are damaged individuals, victims of their own circumstance. Ruth declines Sig’s offer and momentarily leaves the apartment.
It was certainly a challenging experience
When Harry returns home, he finds Sig, alone in his apartment, helping himself to the strawberry jam and bread at his kitchen table. It is at this point that the play takes a bizarre turn and had me wondering whether I was watching a scene from a bedroom farce or a piece of contemporary theatre. Agius brought out the delicate comedy of the scene beautifully. Sig candidly shares his plan and even willingly allows Harry to bind him in a straight jacket... the same straight jacket worn by Harry during the years he spent recovering from post traumatic stress disorder in a mental asylum following his return home from the battle zone.
On her return, Ruth decides to hang herself from the rafters above the kitchen table. This is not her first attempt at suicide and yet once more she is unsuccessful. The scene is stripped of its realism and, consequently, became for me the play’s iconic image as the audience sees this fragile woman frantically digging her high heels into the surface of the kitchen table and failing to overturn it as the shopping trolley assumes a life of its own.
The fact that Bond chose to premiere this powerful piece of theatre in Malta is a great testament to Adrian Buckle and Unifaun Theatre’s unflinching efforts to champion contemporary theatre on our local stage. It was certainly a challenging experience for most of the audience present but in much the same way that Bond asks his actors not to act out the characters but enact each situation. I ,eventually, learnt to let go of my strong desire to comprehend in favour of simply being present to the theatrical event happening in front of me and (to use a line from Bond himself) asking myself “Why do we sit in a theatre?”.