FringeReview UK 2023
The Silence and the Noise
Pentabus Theatre Company and Rural Media
Genre: Drama, Film, Short Plays, Theatre
Venue: Pentabus Film
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
It’s not often a prizewinning play morphs immediately into a film. Or rather by the time it won a prize, it had been turned into a film. Tom Powell’s The Silence and the Noise, won a Papatango Prize in 2021 after winning Best Film and Best Actor at the BIFF film festival.
It’s understated, there’s no howl here, no explosive projections about what this half-life must be like. The fade here though is like a quiet cheer, as something might be salvaged as terrible things are left behind. Do see it.
Directed by Rachel Lambert and Elle While, Producer Julie Colman, 1st Assistant Director Em Smith, Director of Photography Luke Collins, Focus Puller, Rafael Lisbon Hochenberg, Camera Operator Allesandro Repetti, 2nd Focus Puller Adam Thomas 2nd assistant Camera Callum Neville, Gaffer Dave Anderson, Location Sound James Clark, Digital Imaging Technician Alice Hughes, Set Dress & Props Supervisor Eve Colman, Construction Paul Colman,
Production Assistant & Costume Supervisor Elisa Cooper Williams, Production Assistant Danny Lambert, Make-up Artist Chelsea Stevens, Sound Design Justin Dolby, Music Composer Billy Lambert, Post-Production Co-ordinator Rich Hankins, Colourist Luke Collins, Offline Editor David Jones,
For Pentabus Amber Knipe, Catrin John, Verity Over-Morell, Head of Production Julie Colman, Executive Producer Grant Black
Supported by Arts Council England, Hall Garth Trust, Hereford Community Foundation
Available to stream from Pentabus
Review
It’s not often a prizewinning play morphs immediately into a film. Or rather by the time it won a prize, it had been turned into a film. Tom Powell’s The Silence and the Noise, won a Papatango Prize in 2021 after winning Best Film and Best Actor at the BIFF film festival.
Directed by Rachel Lambert and Elle While for Shropshire-based rural theatre company Pentabus, it’s now an hour-long film. Any Papatango play is worth trekking to. Two recent winners, both staged at Southwark – The Funeral Director and especially Shook – proved blistering, unforgettable, social bullseyes.
The film of The Silence and the Noise follows in that tradition. It sensibly keeps more or less to one location with a few shifts in angle. You can easily retro-imagine it as a play. That brings benefits though highlights a kind of limitation. Part of me wants to see it back as a two-hander stage-play, where more visceral acting might be released.
Not that these two actors hold back. As well as an award-winning production, it stars Rachelle Diedericks (a memorable Mary Warren in The Crucible, NT, Our Generation, NT, and Headlong’s A View from the Bridge, the best performance in it) as Daize and William Robinson (Bacon, Finborough, Edinburgh, New York, and Mark Antony in the RSC’s Julius Caesar) as Ben. Robinson’s almost unrecognizable from that role.
Dialogue is laconic, knowing, funny snappy and sometimes swallowed. Authentically elliptical, it snaps like the young people who speak it. And it can sometimes snaps hearts too.
Ben’s being held at knifepoint by Daize near her home. Just three overgrown locations are used, all in the same place, only differentiated by a few yards. An old outdoor sofa where Daize chooses to sleep. A couple of white plastic garden chairs. And once, at the back of Daize’s house. All is tangle, we’re on the edge of an estate in Hereford; maybe.
They’re teenagers either side of a county line. Ben’s a drug runner and Daize daughter of an addict. Through all sorts of sallies and feints, they manage an edgy camaraderie. Daize or Daisy (only her mum gets to call her that) upbraids Ben – who’s middle-class and able to walk away (or so she thinks) from this mess. Daize, who’s determined to do well at school resorts to eating out of cat food and that’s only, as later becomes clear, because that’s all she could steal. When found out, her village shopkeeper believes her tale of a sick cat and gives her a tin every day: that’s her diet. Meanwhile her user mum depends on Beetle, the man Ben works for. She’s attached to him.
So impossibly is Ben. But when Ben reveals kettle scalds from having lost some drugs after a mugging, and bruises, even he begins to question how benign Beetle is. Ben trusts the £11,000 Beetle declares is his, will one day make him a millionaire. and he has far more than Daize. But has he?
Daize and Ben keep meeting as Ben comes on an errand and then to find Daize. We’re flagged up ‘two weeks later’ and ‘a week later’ or ‘the next day’. Time passes over a buzzing early summer. Ben’s been excluded (“two more days to work”) effectively dropped out. Something happens at school to Daize too, they’re stuck. Ben brings more injuries but protests in Stockholm Syndrome manner that Beetle has his back. He’s come to love his owner. The couple keep playing curiously intimate, tenderly non-sexual flirty games with each other. As adults darken, can these two antiphonally-ranged teens have the capacity to bring light? Only by bringing the dark down. But that might be enough to save them, if no-one else.
This slow-burn, up-close work sustains its hour, though it’s a drama that lacks a natural screen acceleration. Billy Lambert’s gentle atmospheric music adds to the feel that we’re in a world of two, that despite a few noises of like a car arriving, an eternity stretches. On stage this might translate to the slow-drawing-on of a climax. For a climax certainly comes.
The apotheosis is shocking but it’s off-screen. What we watch is a reaction and a decision, even more compelling. Here, with such a film some might have chosen a few indoor scenes with prone people. But the directors eschew this, and keep to the purity of theatre: everything else is offstage, and it unfolds like a Greek tragedy with an apotheosis that’s affirmative after unimaginable trauma.
I’d like to have seen a bit more reaction to this from these terrific actors, and the pace never shifts beyond the same moody low-key small-film feel. But the story’s compelling with a double sucker-punch, and the actors live their characters throughout.
Robinson’s not-quite articulate Ben struggles to an eloquence despite himself, and shrugs his way to wisdom; a study in hunch and snaffled fright; as well as teen denial. He’s clearly softer and more middle-class – despite his rural accent – than Daize from the start.
Diedericks won an award for this: you can see why. All fragile defensiveness and raillery, she’s also able to register a whispering soft core as Daize shudders out her vulnerability at key points. It’s understated, there’s no howl here, no explosive projections about what this half-life must be like. The fade here though is like a quiet cheer, as something might be salvaged as terrible things are left behind. Do see it.
