Review: TRAINERS (A THEATRICAL ESSAY), Gate Theatre

Trainers is one of those shows that have their public gaping at the stage. It's a political and radical experience. The website of The Gate Theatre forewords the synopsis with "The only rule is to break the rules", which fits perfectly within the work as a whole and the full title is an entire microcosm in itself: Trainers Or The Brutal Unpleasant Atmosphere Of This Most Disagreeable Season: A Theatrical Essay.

Written by American interdisciplinary artist Sylvan Oswald, the play (or performed essay, one could suggest) is a disruptive, subversive, very in-your-face piece of theatre that overturns forms and methods under Hester Chillingworth's staunch and gripping direction. Set in a nondescript but parallel timeline as ours during a civil war, it paints a capricious and flickery relationship between a struggling writer and a revolutionary.

Drawing from the - mostly intellectual - love affair between French philosophers Michel de Montaigne and Étienne de La Boétie, and inspired by the first's essays, it feels more like a manifesto of sorts than a simple theatre production. Nando Messias and Nicki Hobday are the incarnation of the writer. Their duality and delivery makes gender and its performative elements inconsequential and irrelevant with Chillingworth's narrative approach.

The result is very visual and rooted in metaphor, with even Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley's roaring sound design becoming a medium for rage, bliss, calm, fury, spite, and lust to accompany the text. Hobday and Messias argue and agree with each other, instigating an internal dispute that addresses love, identity, beliefs, and philosophy. The nature of the almost surrealist angle goes hand in hand with the notion of live art and presents its material with the same flair.

While every element of the production is quite curious when analysed by itself, they all click together to, somehow, make the piece work. Joshua Gadsby and Naomi Kuyck-Cohen co-design the set, which hosts an accumulation of props on a multi-echeloned structure. With lighting going from naturalistic to highly suggestive according to mood and need, Trainers handles introspection and external chain reactions with precision and personality.

Oswald explores how personal convictions and inclinations coexist with the cruelty of the outside world in a dangerous reactionary environment, and tackles subjective insecurity and political systems as well as civil and authoritarian uneasiness. The anachronisms and vague setting paint the universality of resistance through the marriage of Hobday and Messias's own takes of the same character.

The final product is an organised explosion of imagery and topics. Chillingworth's direction takes the focal point of its success and instills a delicate but firm worldview to expose the subtle negotiations that happen in all kinds of relationships.

Trainers (A Theatrical Essay) runs at The Gate Theatre until 21 March.

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