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Checklist For An Armed Robber Vitalstatistix Theatre Company Sat 22 Oct until Sat 5 Nov  Vitalstatistix'
staging of Vanessa Bates' 'Checklist...' is an absorbing treat, piloting
mind and sense through a severely realistic scape of basic but too
often overlooked human experience. 'Checklist...' interweaves the true events of the 2002 Moscow theatre siege and a simultaneous attempted armed robbery in Newcastle. Few story elements are constant, however, with frenetic focus shifts between spaces and mostly nameless characters leaving little opportunity for specific exposition or attachment. Nathan O'Keefe's frail, gun-possessed armed robber and Netta Yashchin's sober Russian journalist receive comparatively extended treatment, but nothing approaching any particular depth. This is appropriate in that it prevents any overworking of roles or, in turn, audience indulgence in character. Each individual is divulged to the extent that the viewer is made aware of their humanity and an empathic connection is established. Convoluted personalities and personal dilemmas are let be, only the concrete realities of these people, in most cases defined by suffering, are attributed attention. This then allows for proper rendering of the play's alternative politics. Bates' and the crew seem to be attempting to wrench politics out of the theoretical and the abstract, which it has rigidly inhabited for so long, and back into human reality, emphasising the direct concerns of characters as human individuals, rather than as ethnically or nationally classified groups with collective, politicised objectives. The Chechen rebels holding the theatre are so enveloped in their cause for national political autonomy that they fail to recognise their actions are directly causing their fellow humans, and ultimately their own selves, suffering. Similarly the Russian authorities are so obsessed with their goal of federal stability that they fail to facilitate human concerns either in Chechnya or in relation to their own people taken hostage in the theatre. This humanitarian political perspective is pursued further in the other story, where the problems and actions of an emotionally feeble drug-addict are shown to be the product of social and self marginalisation. Political processes that are not formal or systemic but social and psychological, involving negative interclass and interpersonal relationships and communications, are shown to be significantly erosive to the individual, driving them out of mainstream social life and into an underclass subsistence of desperation and violence. Full use is made of the vast and almost otherworldly interior of Vitalstatistix' Nile St Hall, with black plastic sheets and crude, undecorated scaffolding surrounding the audience, around and amongst which the actors play and prowl. The viewer is thus required to constantly be turning their head to spy the action, thereby forcing the viewing experience beyond conventional passivity. With actors performing energetically in close vicinity one cannot help but feel a sense of personal inadequacy, as if one should be contributing in some way to the wonderful production rather than submissively consuming it.  |
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