Sarah Tierney hears a late-night tale about a world where art and individuality are under threat
Totally subjective rating: 9/10 for bringing a prescient story into even sharper focus.
Who: From the novel They by Kay Dick. Co-created and adapted by Maxine Peake, Sarah Frankcom and Imogen Knight.
Where and when: John Rylands Library, Deansgate, 5-9 July.
How much: Standard tickets £30, affordable tickets £15/£10. Book tickets.
What MIF 2023 says: Imagine a near-future where creative expression is outlawed, all art eradicated and any resistance takes enormous courage. Would it be enough to go on quietly creating for yourself? To memorise your favourite passages before all books disappear? What is art without an audience or a debate?
What we say:
The dystopia Kay Dick created in her 1977 novel They is eerily familiar in 2023. The curtain-twitching, enforced conformity of its rural England foreshadows the 2020 lockdowns, but that’s not the only reason it feels so current. Essentially, it’s about how people behave when they’re afraid, and how they behave when they’re not.
It holds a spotlight up to the slow, crushing anxiety of knowing that you’re at odds with accepted behaviour and lifestyles, and that you can be silenced or blinded if you follow your own individual goals. We could be talking about state control, cancel culture, misogyny, homophobia, right-wing extremism; choose your oppressor, they’re all present here.
In the pared-back prose of Kay Dick’s novel, the characterisation, like the context, is left wide open; we get a series of names and opinions and occasional gleaming insights into who these people are. Maxine Peake’s one-woman performance brings each one fully to life. She makes these artists and watchers real and recognisable, while switching fluidly between them with a deftness and subtlety that doesn’t look like ‘acting’. This is a narrow stage, a continuous close-up, so nothing needs to be overstated. She responds to it perfectly.
Look up though and you have the towering archways of John Rylands, a neo-Gothic library. But again, it isn't over-dramatised; the lighting and sound effects are simple and powerful.
There is a lot left unsaid in Kay Dick’s novel; a lot of the oppression is inferred and hinted at. This performance brings it - and its effects - into sharper focus. For me, it did more than dramatise the book, it completed it.
The novel and the play end with a greeting to a new day, and the line, "It was always possible that through space and in time it would be heard". That’s what has happened here; They has been heard, recognised, and brought to new audiences, who perhaps need it even more now than they did when it was written 40-odd years ago.
Main image: Maxine Peake by Paul Husband
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Read again: MIF ’23 Reviews: You, Me and the Balloons
Read next: MIF ’23 Reviews: AFRODEUTSCHE with Manchester Camerata conducted by Robert Ames
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