Written for Exeunt.
This production of The Notebook - a translation and adaptation of a novel by Hungarian writer Ágosta Kristóf - is conceived and devised by Forced Entertainment, and performed at the Battersea Arts Centre.
I’m going to launch right in here, to what I believe to be the heart of the matter, and talk about the translation of the book to the stage. I’m not doing so necessarily to discuss form, nor to discuss it in any kind of zeitgeisty context, but because I think the process of that adaptation is the very reason that this is a stunning piece of theatre.
I’m not saying that the book should have been made into a piece of theatre, nor that the production is in any way superior to the book. They are separate entities, and I spent most of my journey home wondering why - why this adaptation had to happen.
The Forced Entertainment production, directed by Tim Etchells, presents us with two grown men on a stage populated by two wooden chairs, atmospheric lighting and a couple of bottles of water. the men are dressed identically, they move identically, and they speak either in unison or take turns. The story is of two young boys - identical twins - who are evacuated to their Grandmother’s farm in a Europe impoverished by World War II. The men on stage, Robin Arthur and Richard Lowdon, take on the character of one twin each, and read the story from identical yellow notebooks.
The notebook is something that the twins bought together with the intention of compiling within its pages accounts of their days and adventures. One of the rules of the notebook is that the stories in it are written as truths, devoid of opinion and emotional bias. The result is an emotionally cold retelling of the darkest corners of their young years - the death of family members, visions of bestiality, perversion, the burning of children and the horrors of the war.
Salient point number one: due to the poker-faced reading - the events told as plain fact - the audience’s imagination runs clear and sharp with images that I - personally - will struggle to forget. As such, it is when the performers stop to move their chairs, to take a sip of water, or to begin the next chapter, that there is a chilling collective recognition of the fragile humanity of it all.
The next crucial element is the delivery of the story. Our performers are two grown men, they are two grown men playing twins, they are men playing young boys. This disjunct brings to life the very sentiment that is instrumental to a lot of the discomfort of the piece: that the two boys are experiencing horrors beyond their young years. The difference in age creates a sorrowful image of the maturity the boys have been forced to ascend to. Moreover (without giving away any spoilers), to see the twins lifted off the page of the book, physicalised as separate people who move, think and speak as one, makes the idea of any kind of separation all the more heartbreaking.
Still, I'm not intending to say that this production is an enhancement of the book. It is just a different way of telling the tale, and in this regard, all of my wondering “why” has come back as controversially superfluous. The production harks at the golden notion of theatre as storytelling, stripped of spectacle and complication. Nonetheless, it is a testament to the book itself and Forced Entertainment’s adaptation that we should have the will to stay until the end, for over two hours. The students who were sat next to me couldn’t quite believe how long they were going to have to sit without an interval, and indeed, many may consider it a feat of endurance. Makers of theatre are told never to put a clock in the set because the audience will only be focused on how long they have been there, and how much longer is left. Unfortunately the notebooks from which Arthur and Lowden read have a similar effect, and it may well be personal to me that I found it excruciating to watch how few pages were turned and how many remained.
Yet, there’s something in the endurance that makes the ending all the richer. The content of what we have sat through has been undeniably moving, evocative, beautiful and devastating. And as the boys become real to us, the passing pages of their lives until the end of the notebook are, on reflection, something quite special. We watch the passing minutes of youth, we will a war to end. This stark piece of theatre reminds us that it is the moments in between the chapters that are most poignant.
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