Analogue presentsMile End
Devised by the company
February 4th 2008 - February 23rd 2008
Show starts: 20:00
Running time: 55 minutes
Emerging company Analogue's award winning show is inspired by the devastating true story of the murder of Christophe Duclos, pushed in front of a train at Mile End station in 2002, by Stephen Soans-Wade, a man with a history of mental illness. Mile End is a haunting story told through a contemporary mix of arresting visual performance.
Michael lives alone. When a minor occurrence threatens the fragile order he so desperately relies upon, he struggles to keep one foot in the door of reality. Alex is having dreams; snapshots of the future which disturbingly appear to come true. Kate is very much awake. But before long even her reality is threatened by her husband's nightmares, as he attempts to prevent the inevitable. A startling sequence of events culminates in a 'chance' encounter on the platform of Mile End station.
Analogue are comprised of company members who have served their apprenticeship among innovators such as Gecko, Theatre-Rites, Desmond Jones and Chris Goode.
Winner of a Fringe First and The Arches Brick Award; nominated for 5 further awards - Edinburgh 2007
Analogue Devising Workshop
An innovative, high-energy workshop designed to stimulate creativity and explore the making of explosove visual theatre (for ages 16+). For more information call Ellen Hughes on 020 7620 3494.
When: Monday 18th February 2008 from 2-5pm
Where: Southwark Playhouse
Tickets: £20
To book call 0844 847 1656
or click here to book online now
"...this is neuron-firing, emotionally hot-wired theatre from a visionary young company"
Metro
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Creative Team
Devised by |
- the company |
Music composed by |
- Simon Slater |
With original tracks by |
- Lady and the Lost Boys |
Produced by |
- Ric Watts |
Supported by
Reviews
On the subject of psychotic murderers, Mile End is loosely based on the case of Stephen Soans-Wade who, in 2002, unsuccessfully tried to get himself sectioned then pushed someone under a train in east London. Devised by the young, award-winning company Analogue, this multimedia piece is both disturbing and inventive. Amid a jangling urban soundscape, the mentally ill Michael (Liam Jarvis) and his victim Alex (Sam Taylor) hurtle towards their fatal encounter, zigzagging between two blackened slabs of wall which, being on wheels, also alarmingly shunt towards the audience. Unfortunately, the acting and the video projections are uneven. Furthermore, the overridingly superstitious approach adopted by Analogue is reprehensibly foolish. The piece centres on Alex dreaming of his doom, with his ominous visions coming to pass. This is the stuff and nonsense of ancient folklore, not 21st-century actuality. The programme notes even suggest: "With hindsight, everything seems inevitable. Soans-Wade was always going to kill [Christophe] Duclos." No, an independent inquiry found that the NHS failed properly to assess the risk Soans-Wade posed. Kate Bassett
Independent on Sunday Read Full Review
This multi-media piece created by the young company Analogue caused a splash on the Edinburgh Fringe last year. Almost as filmic as it is theatrical, it combines an unsettling score and video imagery with text and live action to tell the intertwining stories of the Mile End residents Alex, who lives with his wife Kate, and Michael, a troubled young man with mental health problems. Inspired by the real-life case of Stephen Soans-Wade, who in 2002 murdered Christophe Duclos by pushing him under a train, the work portrays the collision of two existences and two imperfect versions of reality - one, Alex's, fraying at the edges, and the other unravelling. The threads of each are woven together by fate with the inevitability of classical tragedy into a single shared destiny on the platform at Mile End Tube station in East London. Black-clad masked figures, like menacing puppeteers, glide about a set whose walls and furniture have an unnerving habit of sliding away unexpectedly. Michael, irrationally obsessed with the unreliability of weather forecasts and tormented by what seems to him the maliciously aggressive loud music from the flat below his, imagines that the floor beneath his feet is disintegrating. Alex, meanwhile, is prey to vivid dreams in which mundane mishaps - the shattering, for example, of Kate's favourite mug - are premonitions of violent death. The dialogue is full of doom-laden portents. Birds inexplicably drop dead from the sky, there are rainstorms of biblical proportions. “It's gonna be f***in' murder out there,” says Michael's neighbour on the stairs. The 55-minute show conveys a sense of the unwitting interconnection of urban lives, and its visual inventiveness is impressive. But it remains elegantly insubstantial. Its characters are as flat as the video images, and the issue it raises - of the potentially dangerous abandonment in society of the vulnerable and mentally ill by the authorities - here becomes little more than a vehicle for slick theatrics. But if Analogue can develop their work further, coupling their presentational flair with more complexity and greater textual and intellectual muscularity, then the imagination and ingenuity here augur well for the company's future. 3 Stars - Sam Marlowe
The Times Read Full Review
This devised piece by young ‘multidisciplinary collective’ Analogue was inspired by a man being pushed under a tube at Mile End station; the person responsible had apparently been trying to get himself sectioned in the weeks running up to the incident but psychiatrists had concluded that he didn’t pose a significant danger. Analogue uses the event as a springboard to ask questions not so much about attitudes to mental health but rather ‘about fate and freedom, about options and omens’. As a consequence the show is heavy on portents. A couple with trust issues bicker about whether she should be allowed to go out shopping alone; when he has a doomy dream, he begs her to throw away a red scarf and avoid the underground. Meanwhile, a man who lives alone begins to display worrying behavioural traits. This multimedia production demonstrates some incipient visual flair: the pulsating floorboards are a nice touch, as is the schizophrenic splitting of the man with mental issues. The shadowy figures clad from head to foot in black who manipulate the props are both spookily effective and just a little bit silly-looking. Performers, screens and furniture blocks all sashay around the stage with admirable fluency, although the three main characters are unengaging and, to paraphrase another work that takes omens and free will as its subject, there’s the occasional sense that it’s all just a lot of nicely choreographed sound and fury signifying a good deal less than it might. 2 Stars - Robert Shore
Time Out Read Full Review
Mile End, a devised piece by Analogue that played to acclaim in Edinburgh last year, appears more muddly than visionary after its journey south. Based on the true story of a mentally ill man pushing someone under a train, it strains to create a portentous, Ides of March-type sense of the inevitability of fate. A flurry of almost comically short, wordless scenes at the start is no help in establishing people and place. Once we've separated out the two strands, featuring couple Kate and Alex, and loner Michael, it starts to meander - no mean feat for a 55-minute running time - at a slow burn and the whole thing winds up feeling terribly undercooked. 2 Stars - Fiona Mountford
Evening Standard Read Full Review