THE DROWNED WORLD (Guildhall School of Music and Drama)****

 

By Cal 

Link: https://www.gsmd.ac.uk/about_the_school/view_all_events/?tx_julleevents_pi1%5BshowUid%5D=6877 

Available until: 10^th March

Imagine a word where you’re either accepted or you’re not. Where worth is decided on how you look. Beautiful people rule the world. People who are not beautiful must be disposed of

Maybe we don’t need to imagine it. For some people, that is the real world. Social media is taking over and social media values beauty. Everyone tries to post the most beautiful (or the most airbrushed) photos on Instagram. If they don’t get recognition, it’s a disaster. I do believe that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I would like to believe that everyone is beautiful to somebody, but we are often the people beholding ourselves, in mirrors and in selfies, and judging ourselves based on our Instagram views, and it’s so easy to see everything that’s wrong and nothing of what is right. When really, only one thing is wrong and that is the belief system that values beauty above everything else.

Of course, it would be even worse if we were valued based on intelligence. Everybody can be beautiful to somebody, but believing that everybody is intelligent to somebody might be a bit more of a stretch – though intelligence is very difficult to measure and there are also different types of intelligence. If we were valued based on how nice we were, that would create a better world in theory, but we already have a problem with people being fake. Would that situation improve if being fake was, at least for some of the people, essential to survival?

But let’s get back to the play. To the world that is nothing like ours on the surface but disturbingly close to it underneath. The Drowned World was published in 2002, before social media became a thing. I was two in 2002 so even if I do have some vague memories, which I probably don’t, I doubt I spent a lot of time online. My mum says the internet was around, though not everyone had access to it and you either had to pay a lot of money or book internet time at the library. Some people had email addresses, but that was more a work thing. There were online internet forums which you could post on without creating an account. There were search engines, but nothing with the scope of google.

There was no way of knowing what we’d all be doing in 2021, almost twenty years later, yet Gary Owen has written a world that feels scarily like the one we live in now. Whether it was a nightmare fantasy or an all too accurate prediction, I couldn’t say. But it’s a powerful piece that shocks us twice over, firstly because the world of the play is so terrible and secondly because there are far too many similarities with the world we live in now.

There are four characters in this play. Kelly and Darren are citizens and Julian and Tara are non-citizens. This means Julian and Tara need to be disposed of - by Kelly and Darren. The characters navigate the play, getting to know each other and themselves. They are similar on the surface. Four young people living in the same city. But Kelly and Darren want to be good citizens who do the right thing. Julian and Tara want to survive… at first. I suppose, in a way, Kelly and Darren want to survive too. If you want to survive socially in our world and not become an outcast, you do whatever it takes. Though most people don’t go as far as killing, there are people in school, work and social environments who will either ignore or bully those that aren’t seen to fit in. There might be some vague feeling that if you do it long enough and hard enough, these people will become ‘normal’. But in The Drowned World, you’re either ‘normal’ or you’re not. 

Director John Haidar has put this together amazingly quickly. The programme notes say the production did not exist on 4^th January. On 3^rd March, it appeared on the website of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, beautifully-filmed and brilliantly-performed.

The four actors are Guildhall students, though they filmed everything from their homes. The play is mostly written as a series of monologues with the four characters telling the story between them and that suits lockdown theatre very well, but there are moments where the characters directly interact. These moments are all the more powerful because they’re so rare. Most of the time, the interactions are described by whichever character is narrating that part of the story.

The actors are excellent. Kitty Hawthorne (Tara), Conor McLeod (Darren), Justice Ritchie (Julian) and particularly Grace Cooper Milton (Kelly) speak their lines meaningfully and compellingly. They were clearly asked to film their lines from a few different angles and this is really effective. When a character states what another character has said to them, the angle switches, sharply and suddenly but in terms of performance, it’s seamless, with one line flowing into the next. The script seems to give little opportunity for the characters to show personality - personality isn’t valued here and the characters are focused on other things. But the actors all deliver emotion brilliantly. They can also shut off their emotions equally well, their eyes suddenly cold, their voices chilling.

 

The Drowned World is a play that suits the lockdown world perfectly – perhaps even better than it would suit live theatre. For that reason, I strongly encourage you to watch it while it’s here.