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MUD REVIEW
Review of Mud, Arcola Theatre, 27 Arcola Street, London, E8 2DJ, England 10 -27 September 2003.
Cast: Lloyd - Tom Power, Mae - Vivienne Gibbs, Henry - Myles Hewitt. Director - Tiffany Watt-Smith, Lighting Design - Luigi Ioele, Design - Naomi Dawson, Set Production - Sam Dowd.
Once in Studio 2's black walled space, the audience walks a pathway of wooden planks to a raised seating area around three sides of the stage. There, in lamplight, wait the wooden floorboards, the worn down wooden chairs and the table splitting apart. In this spare, limiting world Mae (Vivienne Gibbs) in her thin, floral cotton dress ironed, folds white cottons, and tidies up as part of her aspiration towards some barely understood light. Here Lloyd (Tom Power), is very much the child-like waif of the group, his torso streaked with mud, mooching about in his rolled up trousers as he ineffectually scratches his crotch. Lloyd is vividly humiliated in his impotence and confused by Mae's studies. Tom Power sensitively conveys Lloyd's aching innocence, making him amusing but sympathetically understood to the play's close.
Mae invites Henry (Myles Hewitt), into this poverty supposedly as the more literate older neighbour who can read a medical leaflet and so throw light upon Lloyd's ill health. Instead, Henry can stumble over the leaflet's words but not understand them. A modest, shared meal gives the opportunity for community but when joining Mae and Lloyd for a meal Henry can say grace, can repeat grace when Mae longs to hear it again, but cannot understand why Mae should be so deeply moved to tears. Even though Henry has no grasp of Mae's need for these heavenly and earthly worlds he is desperately invited by Mae to usurp Lloyd's place in her bed. Vivienne Gibbs (Mae) beautifully paced the poetic rhythms of Fornes' words so that the power of Mae's longings for her utopia was understood.
When Henry literally falls so that Mae has two men dependent upon her she will not relinquish her compelling need to follow her imagination and she leaves, clutching her minimal belongings. Both men are frightened but Lloyd's plunge into the terror of life without Mae is complete as he seizes the gun and tears after her. A shot is heard offstage and Lloyd returns carrying a freshly mud streaked Mae to lay her upon the table in the white sheets she will die in. Mae's face is turned to the wooden wall. The audience can focus closely upon her words, her compelling need to follow the light for 'It is faint and yet it consumes me. I long for it. I thirst for it. I would die for it. Lloyd, I am dying.'
That it was at the Arcola Theatre where Mae declared 'I work. See, I work.. I'm working. I learned work. I wake up and I work. Open my eyes and I work. I work' was appropriate. The Arcola Theatre project flourishes within a shared act of imagination in a building once home to a clothing sweatshop in what is still a hard pressed community in Hackney, London. The pity and anger of Mud all remain relevant. The illiteracy of Mae, Lloyd and Henry condemns an educational system supposed to serve them. The health services cannot reach Lloyd in any way he can realistically use. Women continue to die in domestic violence. Guns make poorer communities suffer disproportionately and power still seeks to stifle individual autonomy. Director, Tiffany Watt-Smith, is to be commended for putting before us a play which though twenty years old remains as relevant here and now in the UK as it was in 1983 when first produced in California and New York. Mud centers upon the journey of one woman's imagination but Mud speaks of the predicament of many living bleak lives almost untouched by the services supposed to reach them. One applauds the critics who went to the Arcola Theatre to review the innovative Come Out Eli, being staged during the same period, but it is a loss that the subtleties of Mud, a play as relevant now, seems to have been passed over by critics for the more obviously 'political' play.
Review Date: 19/09/03
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