The Gretchen Question offers a unique opportunity to see a new site specific piece of theatre performed in the secluded grounds of Deptford dock’s 16th century Master Shipwright’s House.
As may be deduced from its name, the backdrop of this outdoor space is the Thames and the energy-guzzling skyline beyond it, a distant landscape of coloured lights adorning concrete set against the dark sky.
This natural 21st century set is surprisingly fitting for a story that starts out with Gretchen, an inquisitive 18th century lady, looking at the stars, since the action reveals not one but three heroines, in a web of stories that also takes in contemporary jobbing poet Lulit and influencer, Maisie.
Lewisham is the Mayor for London’s Borough of Culture and this co-commission from Fuel, Deptford’s arts centre the Albany, and We Are Lewisham is part of the Borough’s programme of events looking at the Climate Emergency.
Present-day Maisie uses her celebrity to exploit a brand partnership with green-washing energy company Nova to blag a self-promoting trip to the Arctic.
The televised trip reveals what we all know about reality entertainment but avoid thinking about, and Maisie’s manipulation by television producer Davina may open eyes just as the scales dropped from Maisie’s when faced with the evidence of her own experience.
Lulit wakes up at the ice rink the morning after Maisie’s launch party, her memory of recent events is vague at best and she goes on to develop an inexplicable set of physical symptoms and hallucinations. As she starts a quest to understand what happened, she too is shown to be compromised, as her creativity is moulded to the commercial needs of others.
Could the origins of Maisie’s and Lulit’s ordeals lie in the events witnessed by 18th century Gretchen. In a period of scientific discovery, intelligent and curious Gretchen’s concerns over the exploitation of natural resource, the power generating Gretchen Pearl named in her honour, are silenced.
“Nothing lives long in a stagnant pool… Progress carries risk,” she is told, but when even her guru, the non-fictional writer, philosopher and scientist Goethe, takes the coin to deny the dangers of mining the pearl, her conscience compels her to take action. Even her extreme measures, though, cannot put the genie back in the bottle.
The three women’s narratives combine to provide something epic in nature and are given human scale by the addition of the two Daves, maintenance workers at the rink. They are the ‘ordinary Joes’ who go about their lives and suffer the environmental changes they do not understand and can do nothing to rectify.
Together, the stories and themes play out both alongside and through each other under the visually creative direction by co-writer (and local resident) Melly Still. Melding the strands in this way makes it impossible not to link them, though I could have done with more clarity and less contrivance.
Still’s co-writer is Kent-based composer, director and playwright Max Barton. His award-winning company Second Body provides the atmospheric music, but playing the (previously recorded) ‘heartbeat’ of the audience is, alongside the blue ectoplasm and others, an effect that failed to reach its target.
The action of The Gretchen Question plays out on a set by award-winning E M Parry. As inventive as Still’s directorial approach, Parry’s multi-level set is elegantly plain and deceptively simple.
The cast deliver in spades. Ryan Gerald and Al Nedjari as the two unpretentious Daves provide a friendship that is genuine and moving, and by contrast, in the role of Davina, Katherine Manners’s casual control is chilling.
Yohanna Ephrem as Maisie and Tamaira Hesson as Lulit give their heroines a contemporary confidence, the former tempered by naivety and the latter with determination.
Lauren Moakes delivers Gretchen sensitively as a feisty woman born before her time and educated beyond her role in society. Alex Mugnaioni plays her husband, the scientist Joseph Banks, a cold-hearted businessman emerging from the shell of a charming and intrepid explorer.
Christopher Saul’s David Attenborough sound-alike naturalist is avuncular and scholarly as he details the milestones of an avoidable long, slow death. This drawn-out description, surely a metaphor for the equally avoidable destruction of the planet, is laboured and unbalances this cleverly-structured but overstuffed play.
As well as taking a provoking look at the Climate Emergency, The Gretchen Question provides a sideswipe to colonialism and the treatment of indigenous peoples, whilst also shoe-horning in the actual Gretchen Question and issues of man playing God. It makes for a very stimulating but rather indigestible 95 minutes.