Review: Heart Of Darkness, Imitating The Dog, York Theatre Royal, April 9 and 10
INNOVATIVE multi-media theatre company Imitating The Dog have made the journey from Leeds to York Theatre Royal only once before, a decade ago, to present Hotel Methuselah at a TakeOver festival.
However, just as Emma Rice's new Wise Children company is establishing a regular relationship with the Theatre Royal, so it must be hoped that Imitating The Dog will forge a stronger link too, judging by the reaction to the two-day visit to the main house of Heart Of Darkness.
Joseph Conrad's prophetic novella, famously written in his third language of English, has been turned on its head by co-writers and directors Andrew Quick and Pete Brooks in a "re-telling for today".
Written more than 100 years ago amid the optimism at the turn of a new century, the story explored the journey of Conrad’s narrator, Charles Marlow, as he travelled up the Congo river into the Congo Free State in the heart of Africa.
Imitating The Dog re-set Conrad’s tale of lies and brutal greed and of the dark heart that beats within us all as the road journey of a black woman from Kinshasa (Keisha Greenidge's Marlow) through war-torn Europe, ending up tracking down Kurtz in a bombed-out building on the edge of London.
Heart Of Darkness refracted through the lens of 2019 negotiates race, gender and the themes of exploitation, violence and nationalism in a "parable for our times", played out against a backdrop of Brexit, a changing relationship with Europe and a deluded harking back to colonial days.
Imitating The Dog, like York company Pilot Theatre at the height of Marcus Romer's artistic directorship, have been at the forefront of bringing multi-media practices to theatre. Such was the richness of the imagery on screen when fusing live performance, digital technology and live film-making that text sometimes played second fiddle, but Heart Of Darkness is the summation of what can be achieved with such bold and inventive storytelling.
Simon Wainwright, as ever, is the technical wizard behind what you see, while actors not only perform but move the cameras too. On stage is a backdrop with such imagery as a picture of Conrad or a Union Flag and a crying Paul Gascoigne. Above the cast are three screens on which the film is mixed live, accompanied by text and lip-synched dialogue. Green-screen filming techniques play their part in a tapestry that constantly changes before your eyes, but is so effective at conveying the psychological as well as the physical.
The cast even break down theatre's fourth wall for scenes that portray Imitating The Dog's own struggles with Conrad’s writing as they heatedly discuss his text before returning to the road journey.
Imitating The Dog have gone to the heart of a "profound novel about the human experience” by being not too reverential, but still respectful, yet radical, and they even integrate imagery and music from Francis Ford Coppola's film adaptation, Apocalypse Now. Bravura theatre and film-making indeed.
Charles Hutchinson
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