Brighton Year-Round 2024

Circle Mirror Transformation

Tríada Theatre

Genre: Adaptation, American Theater, Contemporary, Drama, Fringe Theatre, Theatre

Venue: SweetVenues, The Yellow Book, Brighton

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

A diverse quintet explores community theatre techniques over six weeks. They’re meant to free you up, break down barriers, turn you into a fluent, open person, even actor; above all enact healing and a little therapy. But who’s freer by the end?

This Tríada Theatre production of U.S. dramatist Annie Baker’s breakthrough 2009 Circle Mirror Transformation premieres at The Yellow Book, Brighton till April 13^th. It’s SweetVenues’ new space, in York Place opposite St Peter’s Church.

But you can catch it later. It continues at The Grove Theatre, Eastbourne, on April 19^th. It then returns to the Old Net Room, Fishing Museum, Brighton Fringe on May 5-6^th; and The Drayton Arms London on May 12-13^th.

Tríada’s version is co-directed and dramatized by Dimitra Barla, with co-director and light designer Strat Mastoris. Given the nature of the work, relying on recent history and local circumstances, it also features three actors (Tia Dunn, Edward Garcia, Jon Terry) adding new material – some of which, like Baker’s, is very funny. It suggests the writer too is involved: no-one’s exempt.

The stage itself is a deep alcove still being repurposed, with a useful exit door and space for up to 30 audience. It’s buzzy, provisional, exciting, ideal for this production. There’s a bit of fourth-wall interaction too.

We know Pulitzer-prize winning Baker through four National Theatre productions (all in the studio-spaced Dorfman): The Flick (2016), John (2018), The Antipodes (2019) and Infinite Life (December 2023). Chekhovian in nature, they often unfold in real time, are glacially moving, mesmerising, some of the finest recent U.S. plays.

This early Obie-Award-winner is very different, also moving in real-time but with jump-cuts. It starts and sporadically returns with three of the actors giving their real and character names, spot-lit in the corner in front of the stage (Mastoris providing atmospheric effects throughout with blackouts).

To a voice-over question, each tries to recall where they were on June 3^rd, 2017: the night of the London Bridge killings. This replaces Baker’s 9/11, an event eight years old at the world premiere. It’s a deft move and the production’s rewrites throughout try repositioning the diverse cast.

Elsewhere the cast speak each other’s lives as remembered, count to ten (not as easy as you’d think, thrown out trustingly to the next person, lying on their backs), repeat gibberish words with private meanings, attack phrases with emphases. What seeps through is attraction, exhaustion, cracks in relationships, breakthroughs.

Following Baker’s fluidity, Tríada nudge characters to cast though otherwise stick to the original: one young female role for instance is reassigned to male. They’re led by therapy-serene-but-pressured Marty (Tia Dunn), 20-year-old Leo (Edward Garcia) who wants to learn real plays and has a problem with fees; Mary’s lecturing-but-lost husband James (John Newcombe), divorce-bruised chair-maker Schultz (Jon Terry) and vivacious, unpredictable actor Theresa (Fenia Gianni, also producer and assistant director).

Throughout the community exercises Marty seraphically imposes, moments then months of personal history intertwine with directives, nominally for participants to discover parts of themselves and each other. No-one said anything about losing.

It’s not helped by Theresa hitting on vulnerable Schultz (Baker’s best-drawn character, achingly proved by Terry) who can’t take it when Theresa veers in another direction. Theresa is the first of Baker’s recognisably sexualised women, who explode with initial desire then red-shift.

It’s an honest, vulnerable portrayal of a robust persona and Gianni radiates halogen-bright intensity, as well as tenderness, in expressing joy, guilt, regret, particularly to James, on whom it has an unwonted effect.

Baker might have drawn Schultz most of all, and Terry winces gradations of hurt and subdued wonder. But this production allows switched-off James agency in Newcombe’s hands, as he slowly turns. Garcia’s Leo too is a superbly fluid reinvention, full of mute frustration (he snaps his fingers for each week) producing a stunningly assured performance as he asks others to re-enact his warring parents.

Tensions between Leo and Marty over that unpaid cheque, not doing “real” acting effect a sudden transformation as Garcia and Dunn face off mutely. Dunn’s Marty though really does up-tempo pace every time she initiates or is onstage. Her energy and clarity crackle, her hurt hints micro-cracks in her adamantine calm.

The safe space of speaking for someone else gets uber-freighted. Confessing secrets anonymously on paper then picking and reading at random brings confession in an unexpected place. Finally, a common exercise – to have Schultz and Leo imagine they’re meeting after ten years – brings truths.

Many things remain distinctly American; there’s some confusion. For instance one character plays cricket in Croydon, but envisaging his bedroom, he cites baseball glove and maple tree. A little more narrative re-ordering’s needed but this is minor.

An exciting christening for The SweetVenues’ Yellow Book, this excellent Tríada Theatre production can only fulfil its magnificent potential. Pace will quicken, it might prove a definitive new reading. A Fringe must-see.

Published April 14, 2024April 14, 2024 by Simon Jenner