Review: 4 Bar and Rising, National Student Drama Festival

This review has been taken from my NSDF blog, written for the Peter de Haan Charitable Trust.

Massive Owl's 4 Bar and Rising presents the audience with a modern everyman exhausted by the strain of life through vivid physical action and choreography. The performance, whose piercing silences are one of its most striking motifs, is play filled with repetition and proliferation. Whilst the everyman struggles, the others in this strong 4 man ensemble cast, pile of on more pressure ranging wildly from shoe regulations to official documentation. The real power of the piece is through the repeated choreography which spreads from cast member to cast member, each echoing the everyman's movement, his runs, blocks and half-falls. The presentation of the play - basic costume, no discernable set save a white backdrop and black wings with simple props - gives the piece a sanitised feel and shows a blank canvas onto which this broad everyman's life can be created in the audience's minds. The show's unlikely superstar is, however, a large, thin sheet of bungee-like fabric which, when stretched out over the performance space conjures up a neat metaphor of this tensile pressure the show's protagonist feels. When this sheet is released, one of the ensemble receiving its force into their chest, the snap breaks the quiet - the silence is beholden to their reaction. 4 Bar...is a show which does not try and top its simplicity and it is commendable that the brave cast have stuck to their guns. A great piece of theatre which transports a communal, universal dread into one unified character and proceeds to be performed with if not clarity, the audience not given explanatory programme notes until the end, but an assuredness which made it entertaining and intriguing in equal measure.

4 Bar and Rising: *****
Image courtesy of Noisesoffmagazine.blogspot.