“Ethnotheatre in its best, most ideal and beautiful form”
I have to admit: I’ve always held a deeply biased view of both verbatim theatre and Eastern European theatrical aesthetics. The insistence on “word-for-word transcription for the sake of authenticity”, and all those Grotowskian declarations like “art is suffering,” or “life is suffering”, all makes me feel a kind of didactic dullness, especially when a production uses amateur performers or has first-person narrators speak instead of professional actors.
The Reckoning completely crushes my naivety and bias. It triumphs with its sincerity of expression, a richness that nourishes both the mind and heart (and literally, your mouth!), and a refined, skilful theatrical language. Co-written by Anastasiia Kosodii and Josephine Burton and based on this Reckoning Project aimed at collecting live, accurate testimonies of war crimes, this part-verbatim, part-fictional performance centres around a man (Tom Godwin) from Stoyanka who refuses to leave his boss’s home, and a female journalist (Marianne Oldham) interviewing him.
Their exchange begins as one of the most painfully awkward fieldwork scenes: cold, resistant, uncooperative, with the journalist only seeing him as the source of “data”. However, this starts to change when she begins to open up about her own family’s struggle for evacuation and about the impossible moral choices they faced. He too, starts to talk, and he does so while preparing a fresh Ukrainian summer salad. They both regret for what they have done and what they have not, laying bare the raw, horrifying truth of war, and perhaps even more horrifying truth of humanity. This is the suffering we must bear. We must suffer in recognition of truth, and only through that recognition can we carry on—to make that fresh summer salad. The salad is not a prop. It is an emblem of life.
Yes. At its core, I think The Reckoning is a performance about vigilance: the vigilance of life, and the even greater challenge of continuing to believe in life after witnessing the abyss of humanity. Maybe that’s the kind of “truth” Grotowski sought, or the “tragic culture” Friedrich Nietzsche once wanted us to rebuild.
Paralleled with this central narrative are verbatim vignettes based on the journalists’ past interviews with a number of informants all played by Ukrainian actors Simeon Kyslyi and Olga Safronova in original Ukrainian, with Oldham interpreting. Certainly, there are compromising parts as verbatim theatre, director Burton works hard to stage them as genuine dialogues rather than stiff, conference-like interpretation. There was one vignette that the journalist and the woman sitting back-to-back and talking, and the silence in-between words is full of unspeakable tension. Kyslyi and Safronova also double as the MC/narrators who greet us, talk jokes with us, “tell me something good”, and … confront us with waves of emotion we almost can no longer bear.
Zoë Hurwitz’s design ensures that props are never just add-ons. Rather, they are agents of the performance. These three pieces of wooden furniture serve as the table, the body, the checkpoint, and the ditch; in precise moment, they are also cued to trigger psychological horror and the darkest human evil. Joshua Pharo’s lighting mirrors the same, integral to the whole performance, capturing nuanced psychological landscape.
Continuing to collect stories, the journalist eventually becomes part of that story, not only because she has also experienced the war, the evacuation and the abyss of humanity, but also because she no longer seeing her intellectuals as mere “testimonies”. Through the dialogues and encounters, she has this most unique, irreplaceable intersubjective bonds with them, and that’s why eventually the man asks her to walk the dog with him -she truly becomes one of them.
The Reckoning will be staged at Arcola Theatre until til 28th June. Tickets and info can be find here