MANCHESTER International Festival's new theatre experience makes great use of the technical scope of HOME's recently opened theatre space. Neck of the Woods, a collaboration between Turner Prize-winning artist and video director Douglas Gordon, international pianist Hélène Grimaud, and playwright Veronica Gonzalez Peña, focuses on the wolf, a creature from our not too distant part which inhabits our stories and fears in an almost mythical way.
It’s a mesmerising piece, one which will be difficult to forget
The piece is dark. HOME's main theatre space can achieve complete darkness and does so at the outset, forcing attention on the sound: a rhythmic violence, gasps of breath. An assault on a person? Chopping wood?
A silent audience, completely silent, no shuffling, no moving at the outset, absorbs the sound. Hélène Grimaud contributes short piano pieces, mainly familiar, mainly from the classical world. Light gradually increases and the sounds are joined by the mesmerising voice of Charlotte Rampling. Writer Veronica Gonzalez Peña brings elements of three stories: Freud's Wolfman, her own novel The Sad Passions, and a short story, A Death in the Woods, by Sherwood Anderson to add to Gordon's original idea of rooting the piece in our myths and fairy tales. Red Riding Hood figures strongly.
MIF director Alex Poots brought Douglas Gordon and Hélène Grimaud together after becoming aware of their shared interest in wolves, and pianos. Grimaud has founded a successful wolf sanctuary, while Gordon's Berlin studio houses a wolf on top of the piano.
Throughout, strangeness and uncertainty sit within the familiar. The opening of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No.2 unaccompanied by orchestra seems deliberately incomplete, partial, yet forces a greater concentration on the piano piece. The story of Red Riding Hood is told and retold, childhood stories and dreams similarly. What do we fear? How does repetition aid our understanding of the past? Should we fear the unfamiliar or the familiar? Where does danger lurk and where does sanctuary lie: in the outer reaches, the frozen North, or with people and places more familiar to us?
Accompanying the internationally known contributors is Manchester-based Sacred Sounds Women’s Choir, local women of all faiths (and none) performing as part of the soundscape to the production. The work of lighting designer Brian H Scott and sound designer Melvyn Cooter is precise and enhancing.
It’s a mesmerising piece, one which will be difficult to forget and one which will be hard to reproduce without such accomplished performers.
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Neck of the Woods runs at HOME until Sat 18 July - BOOK NOW
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