MIF15: Neck of the Woods @ HOME, Manchester
Prior to the performance of Neck of the Woods, an announcement is made that anyone uncomfortable with complete darkness should swiftly leave the auditorium. The assembled audience initially responds to this with scepticism, but amusement shifts when the theatre descends into darkness and the uncomfortably loud sound of a huntsman chopping wood – his chopping and breathing becoming increasingly erratic and frantic – seems to last for an eternity. This is an eerie and deeply disturbing opening; the theatre feels completely empty and the unpleasant raid of the senses feels torturous.
A collaboration between Turner Prize-winning artist Douglas Gordon, pianist Hélène Grimaud, Sacred Sounds Women’s Choir and actor Charlotte Rampling, Neck of the Woods juggles the familiar and unfamiliar in fragments of language, music and theatre. The production is much more a performance piece than a play. Various literary representations of the wolf, notably Sigmund Freud’s Wolf Man, Little Red Riding Hood and Angela Carter’s erotic The Company of Wolves, are recounted and added to as Rampling jumps between storyteller and frightened girl, who has been abandoned by her father.
Unfortunately, the tension created by the first act is immediately lost amid the montage of disjointed images and mixed metaphors. The production doesn’t become more than the sum of its parts, and the various shock and awe tactics, the Miltonesque darkness of the opening passage and the transformation of the stage into a winter scene fail to be reconciled into a cohesive whole. Every time the piece engages with an interesting idea – the wolf as an analogy for threatened masculinity or the sensory process of memory (a theme across Gordon’s oeuvre) – the thought is interrupted and reduced by a competing element of the jigsaw.
The continuous troughs and peaks of the piece are perhaps most evident in the odd use of a limp wolf teddy, which Rampling carries around the stage, serving to wholly minimise the presence of the wolf. Why spend an hour exploring the myth, enigma and complexity of the wolf, only to present the creature in the most futile way imaginable?
Grimaud’s performance of Schumann and Rachmaninoff is enthralling, but remains unmatched by the other elements of the piece; Rampling is shamefully underused and any emotional momentum that she builds seems to be immediately diminished by the proceeding set pieces. Veronica Gonzalez Peña's script, an adaptation of Freud’s Wolf Man, desperately needs some of the choppy cadence and tenacity of Carter’s interpretation. Neck of the Woods is little more than a sheep in wolf’s clothing: the stylised interludes are never matched by sustained emotional substance or intensity.
Neck of the Woods had its world premiere at HOME, Manchester, on 10 Jul. It runs until 18 Jul (not 13, 14), 7.30pm (Sat matinee 2.30pm)