This piece of theatre was immediately
compelling from the start. At first sight, we saw an innocent home video of a boy
playing, projected onto a screen. In the background, sinister music played. Lined
up in a semi-circle were five chairs, creatively utilised during the performance.
The Man On The Moor is based on the true
story of an elderly man who was found dead on Saddleworth Moor on 12th December
2015. He'd travelled 200 miles by train, apparently just to die.
The rest of
the show was based on a collection of other real life stories of people that
had gone missing. The main character in the play was searching for his missing
father and believed his father might have been the man on the moor. He regularly
attended group counselling sessions where other people were suffering because a
loved one had gone missing too
Written and performed by Max Dickins, this
was a one man play delivered in direct address, where occasionally he played
other characters. The script was brilliantly written, providing valuable
insight into how family and friends are affected by the disappearance of
someone they were close to. It analysed and explored the subject from multiple perspectives,
challenging how people outside of the situation talk to the bereaved. That
person could be grieving for someone who is still alive; it's the ambiguity of
the circumstance that is the most difficult thing to grasp. The mother in the
play kept herself busy and bottled up her feelings, in a metaphorical sense,
"pulled a tarpaulin over a volcano".
There was an interesting scene, where
Dickins interacted with pre-recorded footage, presenting the character of the
mum telling him to stop exhausting himself looking for his father. The film was
inovatively conceived, with regular straight cuts to extreme close up shots of
the mum desperately pouring her heart out to her son. It was like a broken and
cluttered portrait. The artisan coffee loving Colin, the brother of the main
character, provided some moments of humour. Although, upon reflection I can't
help but feel that he was a little forced into the story for the purpose of
comic relief. The rhetorical questions, regularly asked to the audience, were
effectively thought provoking.
At the end, statistics and figures about
missing people were revealed to the audience on the screen. This was
appropriately informative, however because we were watching live theatre, I thought
the reveal of these statistics on screen felt a little odd. The eerie lighting
design complimented the performance nicely, especially when Dickins' character
was on top of the moor and we could see a melded wash of green and blue
lighting onstage.
To sum up, the play was informative, compelling, and implicitly
creepy.
Reviewer - Sam Lowe
on - 16/6/18
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