Complicite's switched-on show

10 April 2012

It is a long time since I last saw an actor convincingly play a pig. Tim McMullan does not bother with anything piggish apart from snorts and grunts. He has simply bound two replica human thigh-bones to his arms and scampers about, looking more than half-human, until when famished he manages to tuck into an unfortunate infant, who is represented by a lifelike puppet that the pig consumes in arm-size chunks.

These scenes of ravenous piggery, both grotesque and gruesome, with the representation of the pig as human and the baby as mere puppet, suggest arrival in some strange theatrical terrain. And so it proved last night, when the inhabitants of the plague-ridden village of Kadis in 14th century Sweden were brought to fascinating stage life by the Complicite company.

Complicite's artistic director Simon McBurney and Matthew Broughton have created Light from the bare and dead bones of Torgny Lindgren's book of the same name. But although Light is played out in the deadly gleam of Bubonic plague, with almost an entire community killed off, there are disturbing 21st century parallels. For Light shows what happens when in plague time Godless anarchy replaces order, chaos rules and the old morality shuffles away. As the play's chief character, carpenter Konik, puts it in an irrational sentence that betrays his anxiety "If everything belongs to anybody, then everything is nothing and everybody is nobody".

The characters speak too often in the language of modern cliche. But McBurney's production is staged with much of the visionary invention and imagination that has made Complicite so admired. Only the white-suited narrator with megaphone strikes false notes. Dick Bird's stage-set consists of a bare, steeply raked playing area, shrouded in twilight gloom, with a backcloth of grey clouds. The first scene, when Jasper, a Kadis villager, arrives home bringing a rabbit that proves to be fatally plague-ridden, discloses a little world of darkness, religious singing and half life-size puppets, with mobile heads, that are at once sinister and strange. These dark-garbed mannikins, operated by the actors, seem to take on a life of their own.

It's not the villagers' death-throes, the twitching and convulsing, the bloodiness and bile, the making of coffins and tipping bodies into graves that most concerns McBurney. These horrors soon pass. Light fixes its dark attention upon Plague's aftermath. Avar, the father who rapes his daughter, Adla, to carry on the family line is seen poised in silhouette, a senseless bloodbath of animals is luridly enacted, a widower swings on the gallows for stealing a child after losing all his. The infant son of Konik and his wife Eira simply vanishes.

McBurney stages these outbursts of desperation in a lucid calm that makes them seem the more dreadful. And the music, by unnamed composers, blasts you with violent and desolating sound-pictures. A pity that the magnificently medieval-seeming and heartfelt actors cannot be individually praised, since the inadequate cast list does not attach names of players to individual roles. When a gentleman representing the crown arrives it's no surprise that the justice he offers, with that Pig and Konik strung up on gallows, is hardly more principled than the barbarism preceding him. But the spasm of joy with which Light then concludes is more poignant for being so hard-won.

Light

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