It is not easy to describe what Container is. It certainly isn’t a conventional play, but it is a performance, and its producers describe it as “multi-vocal” using “overlapping choral narratives, live music and polyphonic sound to explore alternative treatments of text, voice and storytelling.” If that sounds portentous, I assure you Container isn’t; it has warmth and a light touch.
Written by poet Alan Fielden and performed by him and co-devisers, speakers and instrumentalists Ben Kulvichit, Clara Potter-Sweet, Tim Cape and Jemima Yong, it takes the spoken word and treats it like music, blending voices, building refrains, creating rhythms, choreographing words in multi-layered textures with mesmeric effect. Sometimes, as at first in a barrage of statements questions and instructions, the sense is clear, sometimes single words surface. “I have never tortured anyone.” “Do you still think about elves?” “Are you pretending to be normal?” “Take a picture of me and this frog.”
They may be non sequiteurs, there may be connections. There is no overall narrative, though a number of miniature fairytale-parables are told as two tiny figurines are spotlit. Glances between performers suggest strange connections, though they may simply be methods of cueing and timing. Clara Potter-Sweet’s voice may rise shrill over the ground bass of the others, or they may all chant together with rising insistence “I’ve got something to tell you.”
At its heart seems to be a meditation on the ills of the world with an emphasis on the refugee emigrant, which culminates in an almost ritual incantation of the things that could be in a container that keeps postponing mention of the ominous contents we know are coming.
Strangely, for a work with a text that seems to seek to directly address its audience, to create empathy with the victims of inhumanity, Container makes little attempt to create any real contact until nearing the end; for most of its 73 minutes, the performers concentrate on their microphones. Though at times it can be very moving, it is as a piece of word music that it holds the attention.