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The Valley Of Astonishment
Young Vic Theatre, London SE1
4/5
IN HIS 90th year Britain’s most innovative director Peter Brook is still travelling the long road as he explores the elusive truths about life that live theatre can provide.
His work over recent years has examined the complex neurological influences on identity, surveying the labyrinthine map of the human mind, and that’s the focus of this play.
With five performers and a bare stage, Brook characteristically strips away the artificiality of theatre to take the audience into the valley of memory.
The object of inquiry is synaesthesia, a rare condition when the synapses — the sense-pathways of the brain — play strange tricks whereby a number of people find their responses drenched in music, colour, taste, images and memories.
Though the play merges illustrated lecture with entertainment, even the most attenuated theatre performance depends on narrative. Here the central experience is of a woman (Kathryn Hunter) whose memory-recall is phenomenal and she proves to be a fascinating guinea pig for neuro-psychologists and the entertainment world alike.
By turns excited, bewildered and frightened, this “gifted’ being finds herself progressively drained of those associative memories which provide the mnemonic bank fuelling her power.
In her search for “the real me” she finds “this rich world I live in” sometimes hell, sometimes paradise.
Brook and his fellow writer Marie-Helene Estienne have skilfully seasoned this absorbing dramatic study of the mysteries of memory with humour, even comedy, as a professional card-trickster showman merges illusion with reality in displaying his skills at naming hidden cards chosen by audience members.
Science and medicine struggle to reduce the human being to a system but The Valley Of Astonishment, working like a dramatic poem as it merges words with music, provides no simple answers to the mysteries of life, only intriguing questions. Memory in many ways can be a prize or a prison, allowing no escape.
Runs until July 12. Box Office (020) 7922-2922.
GORDON PARSONS
