Written in 1977, The Woods is an Adam and Eve style parable about a young couple who are driven mad by their Edenic paradise and by each other. We meet Nick (Jason Cavanagh) and Ruth (Hannah Norris) on a weather-beaten porch, having thrown away the shackles of city living for a sojourn in the American countryside. Mirroring the couple’s physical isolation, they are divorced from any establishing markers. The action never leaves the porch, this liminal space between nature and civilisation, forcing us to instead garner any information we can from their dialogue.
Tucked away in an upstairs room of The Owl and the Pussycat, a new multidisciplinary venue in Richmond, 5pound use this intimate space well to emphasise the couple’s feelings of claustrophobia amidst the woods’ wide-open spaces.
As is David Mamet’s style, The Woods luxuriates in language – in its rhythms, its nuances and its cadences. The script’s vigour lies in the contrast between the two characters. Ruth talks incessantly, obsessed by the natural world that surrounds them and its images of decay; Nick, however, is far more taciturn and reticent to reveal himself. Yet there is something surreal about their dialogue, which collates images and stories to render this Eden both otherworldly and ominous – a bear crawling under the house to die after the house was built on top of her cave; a man abducted by aliens but released; two children lost in a darkening forest, huddled in each others’ arms.
Anyone performing Mamet’s work must keep the vagaries of language in mind, first and foremost. It is here that I think 5pound theatre’s delivery falls down. For me, there was a distance between the two actors that implied the couple were not well acquainted, nor had they spent long in the cabin together. Hence I interpreted the anxiety, neuroses, paranoia and increasingly violent outbursts that permeated their interactions as the result of longstanding mental illness, rather than being engendered by the isolation of their wilderness foray.
This doesn’t mean 5pound theatre’s rendition was bad. To the contrary, I was thoroughly engaged for the play’s duration. But perhaps more attention should have been payed to the subtlety of Mamet’s phrasing, reaching a crescendo rather than going gung-go from the beginning. That said, it is still early days for this company – this is only their third production – and I look forward to seeing what they produce in the future.
