Festival REVIEW: The String Quartet’s Guide to Sex and Anxiety @Theatre Royal

The String Quartet’s Guide To Sex And Anxiety

Theater Royal

Brighton Festival

The claustrophobic close and tempestuous relationship between sex, anxiety and music comes to a head in this remarkable highly focused production from one of Europe’s most exciting theatre directors, Calixto Bieito – he grabs music and drama and collides them head on with the award-winning string powerhouse The Heath Quartet performing alongside an equally stunning quartet of actors to deliver an unmissable montage of melody, hopelessness and madness.

Drawing inspiration from the writing of Byung-Chul Han (The Burnout Society) and Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, this innovative production explores the effects of the 21st Century on our mental well-being, and the way music echos on crumbling sanity and reflects the tensions in our minds as we attempt, sometimes futility to cope, deal and process the endless things that life throws at us.

The set is a huge stack of music stand and chairs, far too many for the eight people on stage, four musicians and four actors, suggests church hall’s and therapy circles, places where we people gather in a circle or let their pain, addiction, trauma or despair out and be heard, and hope that by sharing it, it lessens the pain.

This piece of work is not that kind, nor that deluded and both carefully perfectly balanced music and wretched aching stories of crushing tribulation working against the narrative of time, easing pain and leave us starkly facing the truth, that sometimes there is no resolve to the anguish and only death will provide the silence and stillness of the mind so desperately craved.

The narratives are oddly light, they engage, some of them are very funny, but it’s the laugh of a clown using humour to hide their deep sadness. We meet a women who tells us in lilting gentle prose about the death of a child, each relentless domestic moment of calm taking a step closer to the awful tragedy, an amusing and droll disquieted man who’s tried everything and found nothing works, his listings of treatments, drugs and therapy schools and types is both deliriously humorous and perfectly timed but we feel his unmet needs tangibly. A women who’s sexual anxiety first we laugh at drives us without warning in to the full horror of violent rape, it’s a shocking moment of rage and shame, and still the music goes on, as does the night.

We see deep into these people’s souls, we look at the abyss and it stares implacably back at us, bearing witness to life and all it’s horrors. With prose and poetry intertwined and readings from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton and some rather subtle use of lighting and soundscape we are softly enveloped by these devastating narratives and left, at the end, in the screaming silence of our own minds.

You can see a full list of the works used here.

The Heath Quartet are masterful, their solid interplay both with each other, the narrative and the actors is a tour de force and they kept the tension up to the very last note.

There was one of those rare moments when the audience is stunned and need to compose themselves enough to be able to applause. It’s a real moment of theatrical magic, we wrenched ourselves back to the rococo comfort of the Theatre Royal and the place erupted with appreciation, applause and perhaps the huge relief that we’d got to the end relativity unscathed.