Manchester
playwright Rory Mullarkey’s first full-length play Cannibals defies definition.
I went into
the theatre knowing very little about the production. All I had to go on was
the title, which suggests taboo-smashing content of the, almost certainly,
disturbing variety; the poster – enigmatic, stark but possibly a bit
pretentious in that sort of minimalist arty way; and the tagline – “Death, Love
and Consumerism in the 21st Century.”
One hour and
50 minutes later, after a tense, interval-less, sensory, emotional and
intellectual assault, I left the Royal Exchange feeling a little dazed and
shell-shocked, not quite sure where I was or how I felt about what I had just
seen.
So, how to
describe Cannibals? Well, the tagline is actually a good starting
point. Yes, people love and yes, people die. In the very first scene, for
example, a man tells his wife the many reasons why he loves her, only to be
shot dead minutes later.
But of the three themes laid out in the tagline,
consumerism is the most integral.
In the
developed Western world, consumerism refers almost exclusively to the buying of
things – our endless need to populate our homes and lives with Stuff. It’s why
we have supermarkets: those great bastions of modern society that seem to stock
twenty different types of everything, from shampoo, to cigarettes, to tinned
beans, to loo roll. In short, choice is king... but I often find myself wondering just how luxurious or
unique tissue paper needs to be to fulfil its primary bum-wiping function.
Consumerism
in the remote post-Soviet region in which the play opens, however, is a much
simpler and more visceral affair. The consumers in this society are peasants,
and their main want and need in life is simply having enough to eat, to survive
the long and cold winter. It’s a place where desperation turns people against
one other – a brutal, bleak, dog-eat-dog, human-eat-dog/horse/badger/even human
world.
Mullarkey’s
play roots us in the latter, ostensibly alien world of peasant farmers and war
and economic hardship, of remote villages and old crones and holy fools and
one-eyed icon painters.
Our way in
to this world, our human conduit, is Lizaveta, a young woman whose husband is
murdered, victim to a nameless war.
Lizaveta, played
with great energy and passion by Ony Lihiara, must run for her life. She finds
temporary refuge with a cantankerous, gun-wielding old woman (the brilliantly
deadpan Tricia Kelly) who puts her to work in the fields. Here, she befriends
Josef, a simple but good-hearted fool (Ricky Champ) and a painter, Vitalik
(Simon Armstrong).
But soon,
war and opportunism intrude once again on Lizaveta’s life, and through forces
beyond her control, she finds herself transported across Europe to a strange,
grotesque, bewildering place – Manchester, our world, which, through Lizaveta’s
eyes, no longer looks as comfortingly familiar.
I’m not sure
if it’s possible for me to say you will enjoy this show, in the same way you
may not enjoy watching a dissection. It’s original and compelling, certainly,
but also provocative, brutal, bleak and disturbing.
“Appreciate”
is perhaps a better word, but whether you appreciate Cannibals will probably depend on what you feel theatre is meant to
do.
If you think
theatre’s prime purpose is only to entertain, to provide two hours of respite
from the daily grind, to envelop the audience in a gentle web of feel-good
escapism – then this production is not for you.
But if you
believe theatre has the power to explore and interrogate difficult ideas and
concepts, to take you on a discomfiting but powerful emotional journey, to make
you reconsider your beliefs and your worldview, or to shake you out of a complacency
you may not have even realised you had, then Cannibals is definitely worth seeing.
You may not
necessarily enjoy it, but if you find that you see things a little differently
when you leave the theatre than you did when you first arrived – as I did – then
Mullarkey should feel proud to have done his job.
Cannibals
continues at the Royal Exchange Theatre, St Ann’s Square, Manchester until
Saturday 27 April 2013
Get £10 tickets through Manchester Confidential here.
