THE SOMETHING PRINCE
AUTHOR/DIRECTOR/DESIGNER: Sue Pam-Grant
CAST: Leila Henriques, David Butler and Dorothy Ann Gould
VENUE: Barney Simon at the Market
UNTIL: Sunday
RATING: ****
If you’re willing to dive in at the start, bump into a nursery rhyme, look forwards, but especially backwards in time, while scrambling around in the psycho-analytical world of three interlinked individuals, take the plunge.
As an introduction, the artist states that the self-portrait is the study of self, the artist’s most intimate theme – herself.
“It is in the complex view inwards – the gaze that penetrates back beyond the frame, that allows the viewer to see the lines, the lineage, the history, the cellular patterning, the memory, the mark, the scar… the trace left by time. It is that ‘introspective view’ that reflects and mirrors the gaze, of the viewer looking in.”
And while the line might not always be clear, she opens the window to allow you in. The stories tumble out in poetry, punk prose, pleas and complaints, insights and esoteric meanderings; all visually backlighted by paintings of the self, the boy, the something prince.
It’s immersive theatre which invites the viewer to participate as the stories unravel in unexpected ways while tying into or around one another in a loop that unfolds and clambers over itself.
Follow the dream narrative and catch some of the mad flurry of Henriques’s Sarah as she tries to unpack her relationship with her son and her art, the one that seems to flow into the other as her subject decides no more. Introducing German artist Käthe Kollwitz who lost her son in World War I and through her life focused on the human condition both good and bad, here the artist battles with the blank page, the line that doesn’t run the way it should as she finds the glare from the therapist’s morning window and his gaze impossible to contend with – and has nothing to say – to anyone.
Or swim in Gould’s poetic lines when she watches from a window or sits on the side-lines waiting her turn as she turns like a top in her therapist chair stopping to face the wrath of her patient, a therapist and a son.
It’s Butler’s David who straddles the two women as he prods their minds and memories as the embattled son who grows from questioning to bewilderment.
It is this personification of Pam-Grant’s vision that captures and holds your attention as you drift in and out of what might make sense or not but has you excited by this sense of something new. It is an embracing of the artistic and theatrical world in a way that works with process and performance and demands a different kind of engagement to result in a personal experience.