The Silence of the Sea - The London Magazine

A    descent    to    The    Old    Vic    Tunnels    passes    the    hazards    of    spray    paint,    a    home for home for land rats and rascals. Mildewed brickwork and cisterns of rank water, crumbled archways, dark corners and darker corridors. A fitting   location   to   explore   the   guilty   dreamscape   of   The   Ancient   Mariner’s,    Coleridge’s   mind.   Or   was   it   just   too   self-conscious,   just   too   gothic-chic?    Would the adaptation of this near-mythical rhythmic nightmare play for lurid effects, sensational ghastliness?

Fiona   Shaw’s   first   appearance   disarmed   some   misgivings.   Plainly   dressed   in    navy blue seafarer’s serge, she greeted arrivals with a quiet smile. We were to be the wedding guests ourselves, but this seemed neither pretentious, nor portentous. The stage set was simplicity itself, a furled sail, circular pools of light, looming shadows. And beyond, receding catacombs.

She   began   without   a   flourish,   her   voice   familiar,   unforced,   its   gentle   Irish    cadence homely rather than dramatic. This made the mariner’s outburst all the more startling: the victim is ordinary, like us, ‘one of three’, unnamed. But   a   style   of   alienation   pervades   the   poem   –   the   mariner   alienated   from    his    ship-mates,    from    the    created    world,    from    his    maker,    from    himself;;    the wedding guest from his fellow celebrants, the music of marriage, of companionship;;    even    the    heavenly    bodies    are    picked    out    in    a    chilling,    beautiful, benighted scenario:

The moving Moon went up the sky And no where did abide:
Softly she was going up And   a   star   or   two   beside   –

Fiona Shaw and Daniel Hay-Gordon (her dancing other-self) were, for the most   part,   fixed   in   this   unforgiving,   inhospitable   space.

It may be that the most formidable challenge for the dramatic presentation of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is its familiarity. More than any of the other poems in Lyrical Ballads it commands a visceral, timeless language, beyond and beneath civilised veneer or contrivance of style. It almost seems to be a part of collective memory, to have pre-existed itself. What temerity, then, to act it out, even on a skeletal stage, in a dripping vault!

The way through this dilemma was through the small human voices and gestures of these two vulnerable individuals. Fiona Shaw played the crazed   protagonist,   not   as   a   fantastic   scapegoat   figure,   but   as   a   bewildered,    frightened, amazed sentient animal. She didn’t ever quite know what was going on, but it was certainly happening to her. Similarly, even in moments of cruciform anguish, Daniel Hay-Gordon embodied spiritual and moral desperation, moved by forces beyond his comprehension.

There are lines waiting to be heard, of course, lines that speak to the child in all of us:

For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky Lay like a load on my weary eye,
And the dead were at my feet.

They did not obtrude, nor line up as favourite bits in an unwieldy whole. They were part of the overwhelming questions which drove the one hour’s passage across the stage: why the crime, why this punishment, what is the governing intelligence throughout the horrible voyage and its recurring rehearsal?

In line with this serious wonder, there was nothing of the recital about Fiona Shaw’s articulation. Even the most spellbinding elements of the verse sounded like amazed narrative rather than incantation:

And the coming wind did roar more loud, And   the   sails   did   sigh   like   sedge;;       And   the   rain   poured   down   from   one   black   cloud;; The Moon was at its edge.

The intensity varied, as it must, but there was scarcely a moment free from fear and suspense, the words were truly incorporated in these two performers, it was as if the audience were permitted to witness an ordeal too intimate to be expressed. This brought the horror home, compelled recognition, became a shared awareness:

Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on And   turns   no   more   his   head;; Because   he   knows,   a   frightful   fiend Doth close behind him tread

For the most part, actor and dancer were separate in their darkness and in their pools of light, however much the one inspired and mimicked the other. However, there were interludes of conjunction, in which mutual suffering   achieved   a   grim   harmony,   an   exhausted   release   –

O   happy   living   things!   no   tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I blessed them unaware.

The   pantheistic   moral   assurance   of   the   final   part   of   the   poem   is,   at   best,    partially convincing, the joyful music of the wedding ceremony forever shadowed by the ghostly dissonance of the mariner’s tale and his compulsion to   tell   it.   And   so   it   was,   in   The   Old   Vic   Tunnels,   that   something   weighty    had occurred from which no observer could fully retreat. Innocents no more, we had known more than we knew, more than we should?

There   was   companionship   in   this,   however;;   applause   felt   close   to   prayer,    the companionable prayer that Coleridge exhorts. There was also the final   furling   of   the   ship’s   sail   and   Fiona   Shaw’s   palm   gently   placed   on   her    young colleague’s back. They had, between them, shown us something significant,   as   far   from   showing   off   as   poetry   is   from   polemic.

May we expect more poems brought alive in one sitting from this formidable team? I’d like to see what they make of’ The Eve of St. Agnes;;   then   there’s    Paradise Lost or Dante’s Inferno.   I’d   bring   a   cushion   and   a   flask   of   coffee    for those, without hesitation.