On a motorcycle, you have to slow down once you get that sinking feeling that there’s an accident on the road up ahead. Even if you’re not rubbernecking yourself, you don’t want to be going at full tilt in close proximity to those who are. I made an effort not to look past the sirens and flashing lights towards the wreckage, but sometimes it was unavoidable.
I recalled such incidents in the unlikely environment of the Hotel Malmaison’s first floor corridor and again inside six of its bedrooms, the venues for Dante or Die’s revival of their immersive production I Do. It’s not like Tunde (Dauda Ladejobi) and Georgina’s (Carla Langley) wedding is a metaphorical car crash - though the 15 minutes prior to any wedding always have something of that about them - but there’s enough mayhem to make you want to avert your eyes at times. Standing, a wall at your back, a bed at your knees and the actors so close they sometimes lean across you to grab a prop, you just can’t look away. In this format, voyeur’s guilt often needs a bit of suppressing and that vibe is very strong in this show. Frankly, deliciously so.
A wedding often seems like a form of elongated trial by combat - if you can get through what gets thrown at you, you stand a chance of surviving the rigours of married life to come. This happy (okay, happyish) couple is dealing with second thoughts, the aftermath of a night before row and the sheer, uniquely strange “weddingness” of the whole bloody experience! If that sounds like well-trodden ground for soap operas and daytime movies, well it is, but there are more interesting stories elsewhere on our floor.
In the rooms - six groups of us punters rotate through them - we’re invited to build a mosaic, placing the men and women into a detailed snapshot in time, seeing the same 15 minutes play out from different perspectives, once blurred stories sharpening into focus.
Sometimes the same characters appear in different places, dashing about in the hectic run up to the event that we never see. That trick weaves threads together and, once you get over marvelling at the technical skill required to conceive and execute these simultaneous vignettes without any The Play That Goes Wrong style mishaps, the effect is remarkable - immersive theatre at its best. Even the five minutes or so shuffling about and waiting in the corridor, between scenes which is a little uncomfortable as it’s akin to a standing on a packed tube train, while the cleaner (a Buster Keatoneaque, sad-and-funny Rowena Le Poer Trench) turns back time for us, is not wasted. That’s your opportunity to run through what you’ve just seen and fit it into your slowly resolving mental framework.
There are fine performances in every room you visit. Geof Atwell is deeply affecting as the grandfather incapacitated by a stroke and longing for the compassion of human touch. It’s only in another room that we see the toll it takes on his wife, played with equal sensitivity by Fiona Watson. Manish Gandhi is full of boyish charm as the nervous best man, continually having his speech edited by the groom’s WhatsApps and hiding a budding relationship of his own that suddenly burts into unbridled joy. Johanne Murdock (pictured above in the corridor) and Jonathan McGuinness also impress as the bride’s estranged parents who are struggling apart, but who once struggled even more together, a fact they know, but can't quite shake.
Perhaps it’s the sheer proximity of the players or maybe the superb writing and staging (wrong word, but you know what I mean) by Daphna Attias, Terry Donovan and Chloë Moss that lends the drama its power, but there's no doubt that the people feel so very real, their anxieties instantly established and shared, their hopes soon becoming our hopes too. Distance, psychological and physical, in these spaces suffused with that passive aggression that corporate design revels in, is never properly established because we’re literally in there with them, for good or ill.
The two hours or so runtime, mainly on one’s feet with a lot of direction back and forth by the superbly drilled ushers to avoid us clanging into each other, may prove too much for some. That said, the reward in seeing this specific format of theatre delivered with such verve and confidence, offers plenty enough in recompense. A fine celebration for the site-specific specialist company’s 20th anniversary and super start for The Barbican’s Scene Change festival.
I Do at Malmaison Hotel Barbican until 8 February and on tour
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