As society becomes inured to hearing that more bombs are dropped in more places each day, Slaughterhouse-Five presented by So It Goes Theatre provides a valuable service reminding us of the enduring damage of war by seeing it through an oddly different lens.
Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 semi-autobiographical novel of which this is an adaptation is the trippy and surreal story of Billy Pilgrim who succumbs to disassociation, we deduce from witnessing horrors of war as a US serviceman in Germany, he himself feeling “unstuck in time” having been abducted by aliens from Tralfamadore.
From them, he adopts an unperturbed view of death: living synchronously in past, present and future, the aliens do not fear it nor do they mourn the end of life, marking the event with "so it goes." This becomes a recurring tagline throughout the book, the gravity of the loss of life reduced to shorthand.
Eric Simonson’s stage adaptation of Vonnegut’s anti-war novel is hugely ambitious. Like the book, which is both an easy and a difficult read, sad, funny, dark, choppy and dynamic (and densely packed with things on which to reflect), it requires a complete surrender to its unpredictable relocations and erratically non-linear journey.
Director Douglas Baker leaves no ambiguity over time, a projected counter moves Billy’s story rapidly backwards and forwards between decades, though some juxtapositions could be clearer and some scenes would benefit from a stronger framework to better grasp their import.
As episodes of his life are batted around like a ball in a pinball machine, Ben Howarth’s touchingly innocent Billy Pilgrim wears an expression of wide-eyed bewilderment befitting his unhealable experiences, which are vividly lifted from the page by extensive use of projected graphics.
Baker is responsible for the exceptional video design. Using colour sparingly, it works simply with meathooks hanging from the ceiling in the slaughterhouse where Billy is held as a PoW in Dresden, more boldly with a barbershop quartet, and with breathtaking effect to depict the firebombing of the city which Billy survives. 20,000 or so others did not. So it goes.
The peculiarities of its source material are embraced in this emotionally striking and visually powerful adaptation, which will delight lovers of the novel as much as it may baffle others, but Vonnegut’s intent is unmissable in its clarity.