Brighton Fringe 2024

Geneva Convention

Blank Productions

Genre: Adaptation, Contemporary, Drama, Experimental, Feminist Theatre, Fringe Theatre, Historical, New Writing, Short Plays, Theatre, Verbatim Theatre

Venue: Lantern Theatre, Brighton

Festival: Brighton Fringe

Low Down

Review

“Do you know Katie Jones? And… We don’t believe you.” “She’s a bit boring. Cigarette break?” This is not just a timely and urgent reminder of the power of theatre to discomfit. It strips bare our complicity.

Developed over three years, Mark Hewitt’s experimental theatre-piece Geneva Convention, written and directed by him and playing twice daily (7pm, 9pm) at the Lantern Theatre till May 29^th, seems horribly to have found its time.

Four women actors (Marta Carvalho, Leann O’Kasi, Melissa Sirol, Maria Ziolkowska) combine in Greek chorus, join hands, peel off, turn on each other and find themselves in the suspended, leg-broken, symbolic Geneva Chair for three of the four sections of the work.

It’s housed in a rhomboid steel cage resembling Bacon’s painting of the genocidally-complicit and screaming Innocent X. But screams here are not those of guilt. The guilt’s on the outside. The second tableau is a silent projection with words, as the cage, shrouded in sheets, becomes a rough-magic screen.

Conceived post-lockdown, Hewitt’s exploration of what the Geneva Convention might tell us – what it is to be valued as human life – takes on inevitable urgency after the invasions of Ukraine and Gaza.

By the same token it speaks to conflicts now occluded by these events. Places of interrogation and torture, the atrocities in the Bosnian War, East Timor  and Rwanda for instance, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, Libya and Sudan. Different conflicts, different violations. And that’s all just in the past 30 years.

Hewitt works by choice with an internationalist cast and they speak in their own languages on occasion, or read out declarations simultaneously in four tongues. They’re all exemplary, equally affecting.

Portuguese actor Marta Carvalho has most to do, appears alongside Irish (Leann O’Kasi), French (Melissa Sirol), and Polish actor Maria Ziolkowska. Each add their own experiences; some moments here seem personal. Otherwise it’s a tight examination of the Convention’s own schedule, illustrations of how it’s breached.

There’s an uneasy rapt silence surrounding chants, screams and recitations. Movement consultant Miriam King’s work informs a tracery of movement as the four apparate by first turning one by one on the audience. They move chairs; one takes the Chair.

This in Paul Phillips’ all-encompassing technical design – sound, set and lighting – is a scaled-down model of Daniel Berset’s giant sculpture for the Convention. It’s a broken-legged chair depicting “armed violence against civilians”. The slow revolve of ritual ends in a strange release.

Music composed for the production by Thomas Stronen (recorded in Oslo by Time Is A Blind Guide), striates like an igneous sound through many histories deep: some warmly instrumental, some chilled and withdrawn.

After a brief introduction 1: Wounded and Sick introduces many techniques just mentioned; moments are litanised. Sirol reads parts of the Convention in French; there’s a point later when all four actors recite simultaneously in their own language. Moments of anguish, doubt, ritual abuse of  the injured percolates out.

Hewitt refuses many elements of personal witness here. In 2: Maritime, he had intended to project individual texts and witness of a collaborator; these were seized by Greek authorities. What we’re then immersed in is a brief dressing of the cage with two sheets and video interventions from Matt Parsons: images of a undulating sea, where for less than five minutes words imposed on the sea give brief witness to refugees by boat.

No. 3: Prisoners of War is where that Chair gets a workout. The interrogation quoted above is where Carvalho – who gives her real name – is interrogated, also involving a projection of an overhead camera onto a desk where Sirol languishes; as O’Kasi and Ziolowska go languidly about their cruelty.

Finally 4: Civilians after 30 minutes of theatre proves itself the longest at 18 minutes. Here, as they move smaller chairs round the haunted fulcrum of the show, the actors recite an incident that seems one experienced. It covers extreme sexual harassment and clear danger. Suggesting in its innocuous setting the danger that laps ‘civilians’ outside a war zone, it reveals how the Convention operates outside war, even states of war in peaceful zones.

As the act concludes and dissolves in earlier gestures, there’s a circularity lending nightmarish repeats to the process.

Costumes by the cast accents an almost uniform black. The recorded voice of Sarah J. Lewis enters at one crucial juncture.

At 48 minutes this is a work still in progress, but has found its essential form. Maritime is effective in embryo, still awaiting new material, which can be sourced elsewhere. Hewitt clearly prefers his own, as witnessed by music and choice of design.

What’s wrought is spare, original, strange; at its deepest inconsolable. There’s a desire to unsettle and appal, a refusal to accommodate sensationalism. As this gets quieter, it shouts more loudly.

Exciting as this is, it will devastate when it finds its arc. Hewitt’s famous for poetic installations, as in Maggie Sawkins’ award-winning Zones of Avoidance, which addressed maternity and drug abuse. This might ascend into something crucial.

Published May 28, 2024 by Simon Jenner