PETRICHOR (Theatre Royal Stratford East/Thick Skin)****

 

By Sophie

Link: https://www.stratfordeast.com/whats-on/all-shows/petrichor-online 

Available until: Sunday 13^th December 11.55pm

Content Advisory Notice: This production contains flashing images, moments of darkness, loud music.

Petrichor is a word which comes from the Greek words for rock/stone and the fluid that flows in the veins of Greek Gods. (Which really makes me wonder about the biology of a God – does this fluid pump through their arteries too? Do they even have arteries?) The word is used in English to describe the way the world smells after it’s been raining. The smell is produced by the effects of rain on soil and many people love it.

But the characters in Petrichor might not experience this at all.

In the play, Petrichor is the name of… let’s call it an alternate reality. A reality to which thousands applied and only a few were accepted. That makes it sound a bit like reality TV and there certainly is a resemblance up to a point. The idea is that in Petrichor, you can live a more worthwhile and successful life. You can’t be held back by the things that make you suffer because suffering doesn’t exist.

It’s presented as a sort of utopia and I think that’s how reality TV seems to a lot of people. They see people’s dreams coming true. They see them apparently being successful. They must also see all the suffering these programmes cause, but they don’t seem to take that in. They only see the positives, or at least they believe that they personally will only gain the positives from the experience.

The people who are accepted into Petrichor are also expecting positives. After all, how can you experience negatives in a world with no suffering?

But the audience see the negatives. A regulated world without variation. Without connection. There is no suffering and pain, but it’s also a world without the small things that can give even the smallest moment of happiness, such as petrichor. And the thing about humans is that no matter how much someone or something might try to control us, we are individuals…

Petrichor was created by Jonnie Riordan and Jess Williams (who share direction and choreography duties) and Ben Walden (animation). It shows people performing the same actions over and over again. It shows little in the way of individuality or characterisation. Variation and character are two of the reasons why many people enjoy the theatre and it is to the credit of all three creators that this play commands our attention so well. We want to keep watching, even though we know what will keep happening.

The play and its concept are tense, interesting and exciting. The animations, as far as I was able to see them (more on that later) are inventive and they augment the action. Neil Bettles provides atmospheric music and the performers, Dominic Coffey and Ayesha Fazal, play the people whom we come to care about, even without knowing them. They do exceptionally well with keeping the pace and the rhythm going and keeping everything the same.

Petrichor is seen as an accessible production, but I think it’s important to consider what accessibility actually means. I found Petrichor accessible in that I didn’t need to travel into a theatre in order to see it, but I also found it quite inaccessible.

I couldn’t have the full 3D experience because that’s only accessible to people with phones. It’s a common misconception that everyone in 2020 has a smartphone, but some people are unable to use them, like me. A few people (many of them disabled, but probably not all) choose not to have mobile phones of any kind because they’re intrusive and they have enough to worry about when they’re out, without having to negotiate a ringing phone too.

There were also a lot of moving images which I knew would set off my vertigo so I shut my eyes quite a lot, as soon as I saw a trigger. One reason why I like theatre so much more than films and TV is that theatre doesn’t usually make me feel sick and dizzy. Even when you watch a play online, the camera usually remains fairly still. It switches from one view to another, but it doesn’t dip and sway very often. The movement is mostly slow and animations of any kind are unusual, especially the dizzying fast-moving animations.

Bringing this kind of technology into an online production like Petrichor isn’t wrong. I really do want everyone to be free to create their own theatre in their own way and I do believe it’s possible to go overboard with accessibility. If the only productions that were allowed were productions which every single person can access, we probably couldn’t have theatre at all (and we know how horrible that is). But credit to Thick Skin and to the Theatre Royal Stratford East, who are hosting the play this week: they acknowledge that the production might not be suitable for people with sensory difficulties and autism. Neither applies to me, but it was enough to put me on my guard and watch it through eyes that were ready to snap closed at the smallest hint of unwelcome movement.

I definitely want plays like Petrichor to exist and to continue to exist. There are so many different types of theatre and there is a place for all of them. But I don’t want this sort of production to become the norm. If we become too technologised, it will only cause more isolation for the people who can’t use the more advanced technology (while this is, quite rightly, considered a problem that mainly effects the elderly, some of us are much, much younger) and we see in Petrichor how damaging it can be to isolate people and to assume that everyone is the same.