Review - Song for a Weary Throat

Song for a Weary Throat

By Rawcus

Director – Kate Sulan

Designer – Emily Barrie

Lighting Designer – Richard Vabre

Musical Direction & Composition – Jethro Woodward and Gain Slater

Sound Designer – Jethro Woodward

Director Invenio Singers – Gian Slater

Devised and Performed by The Rawcus Ensemble and Invenio Singers

Theatre Works

29 November – 10 December 2017

Rawcus’ work brings together talented dancers/performers of various abilities is so seamlessly it is marvelous. 

In Song for a Weary Throat, proceedings commence with a chalk inscription being written on the blackboard of the set.  A dark, desperate and overwhelming precedent is set.  What ensues as sound is initially quite shocking (warning – loud noise).  This morphs into an amazing music featuring the exquisite voices of Invenio Singers. 

I would so love to have this celestial music as a re-playable sound track by artisans Jethro Woodward and Gain Slater.

An evocative liminal space is established in Theatre Works.  An atmospheric dark brooding neo-classical design with a bacchanalian feel and a rubbish heap is design by Emily Barry and lit by Richard Vabre.

Like a difficult, dogged and slowly stifling dream, individuals and groups of, performers suddenly change positioning again.  Then - they dance or don’t dance as mood or attitude takes them.  Exquisitely touching and undeniably sad and tormented relationships and tableaux are shifted and danced in and out of.  Timing is of the essence and often stunningly split second.  

Although presented with generosity and wonder this work talks of self-obsession, exhaustion and mean spiritedness.  However it is apparently about hope and this sentence, that speaks volumes, from the insightful Rebecca Solnit is quoted by director Kate Sulan in the program:  “Power comes from the shadows and the margins…Hope is the dark around the edges.”

The 6o minutes of Song for a Weary Throat is a deep and entrancing cathartic journey through an all-enveloping all too human lethargy.   And yet everyone does dance, and, for the audience there is the intrinsic delight of watching many and varied styles of individual self -expression. 

A rich and haunting work.

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)