People Without History

Project Arts Centre

Richard Maxwell makes people nervous. Some people giggle hysterically. Some look at each other and shrug their shoulders, visibly bemused. Others still, get up leave the auditorium, unable to bear the blend of paradox and dispassion of a play like

People Without History

; these are the people who have come knowing nothing about Maxwell and his typically oblique dramaturgy.

People Without History, a co-production between New York City Players and Project Arts Centre, in typical Maxwellian style, is a history-less history play. The setting, we are told, is the border between England and Wales six centuries ago, but under the spare imagination of Lara Furniss this is a digital world projected on canvas, while all the references are contemporary, the language is American slang, and the costumes are man-sized American Apparel babygrows, baseball jackets and bandanas. Maxwell evokes the aftermath of the Battle of Shrewsbury (immortalised in Shakespeare's Henry IV; the inspiration for the play), but it is fake blood that stains their chain-mail, as the characters admit in meta-theatrical glee.

The quizzical dialogue is delivered in emotionless monotone by the seven actors, while ballads are sung in a tuneless chant. The performers draw on the opposite of illusion, marching up and down on the spot to convey movement while staring at the audience with po-faced nonchalance. Tory Vazquez, as the objectified woman Alice, manages to elicit something special and moving from her intoned non-sequiturs.

Maxwell, in often startling passages of poetic prose, focuses on man’s physical urges: his characters are hungry, thirsty, wounded, sex-starved. While we do have to watch a man being stripped naked, thankfully, we do not have to witness a rape.

However, for the most part this is a play about the theatre. “I make flesh. I crave the bodies that let me do that,” channels the authorial voice directly. “I came here with nothing,” Alice insists, invoking the way in which actors, people without histories, make themselves anew on stage every night. However, this is less convincing in performance than it is in theory; and most audiences would choose to watch a production of Henry IV any day. “Do it for real next time,” one of the characters, Owain, says, “it’s more interesting.”

Run finished.