Review: ALICE OSWALD'S MEMORIAL, Barbican Theatre

A lone woman stands on a vast bleak stage and speaks. She names men who have died and the means by which they met their fate - some get a little context too. Men and women emerge from a "sea" beneath her feet and move around the woman - they have no speech, no names, no stories, but they are real. We see their faces, we understand that they have lives, we know that they have families and friends.

Brink Productions relentless Memorial is more performance art than theatre - a rolling roiling roster of those killed in The Iliad as interpreted by Alice Oswald in her epic poem of the same name. Staged as part of the 14-18 NOW programme commemorating the end of The Great War, its impact has something of the Menin Gate's punch about it - just so many names, their fragile individual humanity bulldozed away by man's industrialised collective inhumanity.

There is music too - ethereal, otherworldly, transcendent - Jocelyn Pook providing additional layers to the sensory overload, assisted by plainsong style vocals and occasional choral interludes.

The effect is at once mesmerising and overwhelming. Pretty soon, the many unfamiliar characters (to those of us without a Classics degree) merge into one and you hang on to a "Hector" or "Agamemnon" as an anchor as the PROTESILAUSes and so many more break over you.

The Soldier Chorus come and go too, Yaron Lifschitz's movement direction pulling them all over the stage, sometimes individually, sometimes in groups, occasionally in a hive mind state of singular purpose.

At its best, the performance art takes you to places that are only accessible through such sensory overload. But we're in our seats for 105 minutes with no break, no let up, no chance to breathe, as Helen Morse, in an extraordinary display of stamina, recites and recites and recites. Rather like The War itself, it asks too much of people ill-prepared for the ordeal to come - albeit with very different stakes in play.

And, at the end, such beauty. The chorus's voices - so neglected you wonder if they are really singers at all - suddenly burst into a repeating refrain, about men blown away like leaves and you glimpse the power of such harmonies, the elemental sound of a heavenly host filling the vast auditorium. You long to go back to the beginning and demand more... but the show is over. You get the artistic vision's need for dissonant pain, but you miss the aesthetic joy of that wondrous impact, so long denied and so soon over.

It's trite to summarise such an event into a stars rating or a pithy tweet for there are moments that make your soul soar and there are long moments when you just hope it will be all over by Christmas, but that's the price paid for director Chris Drummond's creation of something unlike anything else. And it is a fitting memorial to those lads from Lancashire and Lincolnshire who walked off singing songs with their hats on the side of their heads, only to walk into machine guns in the mud and blood of Flanders.

Memorial continues at the Barbican Theatre until 30 September.

Photo Shane Reid

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