The lethal stage
For her first major solo, the Director of John Mills, Virginia Barratt, produced not just one, but two performances, which grew over the space of a week from a two-act situation into a three-act completion. Injuring herself too badly to continue the first time (after cutting herself with the axe which she was wielding, something which the audience half-expected consequent on the tension which the act had built-up), the repeat had grown from being a head-on collision with the malignant sources of personal conditioning into something of a resolution, albeit quizzical and suspicious, in a new third act which paid wry and questioning homage to those factors.
Within her detached analysis, Virginia displayed the bitterness at the heart of all the Romantic myths of completion and totality. For, they not only insidiously distorted reality through their mist of rose-pink, but they were the very cause of grief, in place of their promise of hope and beauty. The basic theme of the Triptych was the question of real substance in these myths. It seemed, in this performance, that some residue of worth was left in them after all the purging of self from their influence. Amidst the irony, arose a heroism. The impression of the heroic was the chief one in the performance. Virginia deconstructed the Romance, but left a metaphor in its place of the continuing quest for the integration of personality.
The sense of a deep affection for some aspects of the Romantic underlay her performance. Within the pain of the deception of the encounter with enchantment, within the spell-that-could-not-be-broken, the sleeper could find her own goal on her own terms. The roses, the love-stories, the candles, the dreams
Virginia Barratt, The Lethal Stage Part Two, performance 1987. Photography: Jay Younger
