Extra!_Extra!_Theatre_Review_The_Moon_The_Moon_Southwark_Playhouse

There is a moment in The Moon The Moon that is utterly beautiful: in a dimly lit cement basement, a man in pyjamas strains against the chain that binds him and reaches towards the luminescent moon. Although the stage is silent, the image speaks volumes about the experience of grief. Whether or not we can put those feelings into words, our collective unconscious has been stirred. Somehow we identify with this experience.

Unlimited Theatre excels at creating these kinds of metaphors. From the austerity of Rhys Jarman’s set design to the isolation conveyed via Ben Pacey’s lighting to simple physical motions performed by the actors – covering someone’s shoulders with a coat, stretching out a hand – in The Moon The Moon, so much is said through saying nothing at all. The story is deliberately vague. A Man (Jon Spooner) begins to walk into the sea but is coaxed back to shore by an Older Man (Tim Chipping) who takes him home to the Younger Woman (Suzanne Ahmet). Although the couple claim they can help him, they turn sinister, tethering the Man to the wall of their basement. Though clearly in great emotional pain, the Man is less bothered by his imprisonment than he is by the Moon (Helen Cassidy) who, in this case, appears to him as a shining woman in white. Not only does the Moon speak to him, she beckons him to join her. Most disturbingly, she has his wife’s face.

For all its visual power, The Moon The Moon is nonetheless a frustrating mishmash of styles and storylines that too often feels silly when it should be affecting. It’s not the enigmatic nature of the plot that jars – we don’t really need to know who these characters are or exactly why they’re there in order to understand the depths of their emotions – but the fact that it cannot seem to settle on the type of play it wants to be. Scenes between the Man and the Moon veer from the surreal to the naturalistic (at one point, they sit on the floor and read each other’s diaries), making it difficult to know exactly how we are supposed to take her. Is she a dream or a delusion? A supernatural being? And what of the fact that from time to time she speaks in a Scottish accent, presumably as Daisy, the Man’s dead wife? Still, the Moon’s elusiveness wouldn’t be such a problem were it not for the characterization of the second couple, who alternate between smouldering lovers and cartoonish villains. The scene in which they finally ‘free’ the Man is both gruesome and laugh-out-loud funny (though probably not intended to be).

Though this confusing assortment of scenes may be intended to be experienced as ‘dream-like’, it comes across merely as absurd. There may be as many versions of grief as there are versions of reality, but Unlimited Theatre would have done well to delineate their’s more clearly.

Susan Ahmet and Tim Chipping in The Moon The Moon