Pictured : Kay Tay Ashcroft (Year 13), centre, with the ensemble (top) and Luke Bliss (Year 13), centre, with the ensemble (middle).
A2 Devised Drama
A Matter of Chance
Hamish Lloyd Barnes (Year 12)
A leksey Lvovich Luzhin is a waiter on the international dining car on the fast train from Berlin to Paris. The year is 1924. Too- frequent sniffs of cocaine have ravaged Luzhin’s mind as his life wastes away. By an unimaginable chance, Aleksey’s lost wife, Elena, is on the same train, hoping to find him after five years apart. As the train hurtles towards its inevitable destination, Aleksey moves inexorably towards his fate. Will chance contrive to weave Aleksey and Elena’s lives together again? Devised by the A2 Theatre Studies students, scripted and beautifully directed by Ollie Norton-Smith and atmospherically lit by Jerome Reid, this was an exciting and devastating adaptation of Nabokov’s short story. From the start there was a sense of a race against time: the ensemble, in perfect synchronization, swept onstage before a moment of suspension – we caught our breath and the theme of chance was laid bare as the protagonist, played with mercurial intensity by Luke Bliss, tossed a coin and, with a beguiling backward glance to the last of his good fortune, joined the rhythm of the train – voiced and physicalised with an urgent insistence by the company. The dreamlike landscape they created teased us with a flourish of the glitz and glamour of the 1920s as the ensemble treated us to a slick, wonderfully choreographed sequence where the dining car was created, set against a garish saturation of pink. We were then swiftly transported to the juxtaposing darkness of Luzhin’s ritual drug-taking and the darker, more sinister undertones of the piece became increasingly apparent. Here a variety of grotesque and elegant caricatures were invented whose stories ran parallel within the confines of individual compartments of the train, including the lavishly decadent fin de siècle Russian doyenne, played with haughty glee by Kai Tay-Ashcroft, whose shrill remarks evoked a ripple of laughter amongst the audience, and the predatory, smooth-talking, American tobacco salesman looking for a fast buck and an easy girl, played by Jakob Hedberg with charm and menace in equal measure. Sequences stick in the memory: Luzhin and Elena dancing in unison, worlds apart, to Dmitri Shostakovich’s swirling waltz; the train tracks revolving to disorientate – created by Jerome Reid’s LX design of track gobos
rotating outwards in a spiral. The bones of a sordid life picked over in Luzhin’s memory included a witty and wonderful gambling den of iniquity where, without any dialogue, the dice were rolled repeatedly and urgently – hope diminishing like the spots on a die. Showing us a world riddled with suspicion and mistrust, Ed McNamara created the Russian agent Victor with a compelling blend of superiority and danger as the suitcases formed doors, corridors and stairwells leading us to the attic where Luzhin hid. And Alexey, escaping the confines of the carriage, racing at speed through a snow-swept unseasonal night, clinging on to the rails, and dear life, in vain, made for some impressive and visually enthralling imagery, which would stay with the audience long after the lights came up. Costumed impeccably in black tie and tails, armed with their multi-functioning suitcases, the company evoked a sophisticated glamour, then pulled the rug away by conjuring moving portraits of yearning and loss. Combining intimate stories with a wider landscape of displaced peoples, we found ourselves in the world of the waiters in the international dining car all with a tale to tell. Eddie Graham in the role of Alfred broke our hearts with his reminiscence of his shell-shocked brother lost to war-ravaged Europe, alongside Zak Newmark’s cynical Max, whose dismissive discovery of the vital clue seals the lid on Aleksey’s fate. Jonathan Bray gave us several characters who simultaneously charmed and moved, from the hero- worshipping Hugo to the weary Gertrude, both of whom never failed to amuse. His tender revelation that ‘the dining car was uncoupled at Cologne’, dealt fortune the final blow. The fragile Elena, delicately played by Hamish Kerr, forever deprived of the wished-for reunion, gazed out at opportunity disappearing down the track. As the final fragments of Luzhin’s story became unravelled, his impending fate encroached as the actors moved in slow motion around the space and we suspended our devastation. Luzhin, teetering on the brink of suicide, parted abruptly with the flip of a coin and a sudden blackout, left the audience gasping for breath. This devised creative adaptation was something special and, unsurprisingly, ensured maximum marks for every boy involved – a rare achievement at A2.
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