Tuesday 18th and Wednesday 19th May 2010 @ Tobacco Factory Theatre, Bristol
Showing as part of Mayfest 2010, Bristol’s festival of contemporary theatre

Two hundred years ago two men lived and worked twenty-two miles off the rocky Welsh coast and seventy feet above the ocean inside the Smalls Lighthouse; a historic landmarker retaining many stories and secrets that have been passed on locally for generations including the first recorded use of a message in a bottle. Tonight’s uncorked memo is Keepers, an enchanting tale of companionship and loss told with the aid of beautiful physical theatre, dance, mime, emotive lighting and live musical accompaniment (even if the musician was so close to the stage he undermined their loneliness). Using little more than a couple of chairs, a ladder and a trapdoor, The Plasticine Men conjure up the rustic apparel of this confined and cut-off lighthouse wonderfully, along with the unpredictable weather they are at the mercy of.

There’s not much of a story to be told, more an ambience and sense of time and place to be created, but it’s fascinating to get an incite into the two keepers’ day to day lives as they clean, cook, tend to the house’s lantern and dream of home. They create a lovely atmosphere and there are several moments of breathtaking beauty, notably as the keepers tenderly screw in the light, the gentle, constant rotation of the lantern and the performers using their hands as swimming fish.

I did enjoy the performance but naggingly felt that overall it wasn’t clear whether I was watching a show about two men and their complete co-dependence, or one man’s story as he slowly went mad. In retrospect and after seeing the ‘twist’, I think it was clearly about the latter but this still meant that for periods of watching Keepers, the ambiguity left me confused rather than intrigued and it hindered my engagement with the characters. The play and particularly the two men’s relationship only really made sense once you knew the ‘twist’ and, seeing as the programme highlights this as “an infamous true story”, maybe they expect the audiences to know it beforehand? All I know is that I was ignorant to the background of the story and therefore the show didn’t have the impact it maybe could have.

www.mayfestbristol.co.uk

Matthew Whittle www.matthewwhittleblog.blogspot.com