Night Out At: Caged Time

A Night Out at Caged Time, 16th March 2024 at Shakespeare North Playhouse.  A Silent Gutter production.

It was lashing down with rain on a Saturday night in Prescot (nearer to the North Pole than most other parts if Merseyside) but there was nothing wet about the drama we witnessed that night.

Silent Gutter was back with two short one-act plays that were truly Kafkaesque and oppressive. The small studio space,  blackout stage with almost no props and a constant sound-track of stifling air-conditioning or prison background noise added to the feeling of claustrophobia that ran through both plays.

First up was Echo of Nothing which was a two-hander featuring Faye Caddick and Elspeth Mhairi Todd. Both women were tense to the point of explosion or breakdown waiting for a man, maybe an uncle, from their shared traumatic past childhood. But they shared no empathy and instead taunted, derided and ridiculed each other. There was a constant undertone of suffocating abuse and anguish with each taking turns disintegrating into spasmodic twitching or suffocating retching. Both were sullen and resentful.

This was edgy, tense drama with the audience flummoxed and perturbed. Caddick was wonderfully nasty and petulant with Todd vulnerable and combustible. The characters found a shared fragile solace at the end but we were left thinking they were both still poised on a precipice of disaster.

The second drama was Strip which centred around an oppressive prison facility. Damien Hughes played an unscrupulous, bombastic, overbearing guard and Michael Hawkins playing his pitiful, pathetic prisoner. There is a four-stage process which the inmates have to follow; strip, talk to themselves, look at the view, and masturbate.

The officious pompous guard torments his victim who pleads his innocence as well as his reluctance to take part in this charade but there is something nightmarish and disquieting about the facility as well as the 'crime' and sentence. Hughes gives a convincing performance as the abusive and intrusive tormentor but it is Hawkins character who finds liberation in the strange blinding view he witnesses and there is a delightful twist to end on.

Silent Gutter is still fresh and experimental whilst sticking to its surreal principles of challenging audiences and this offering is beautifully brutish evoking feelings of cramped, confined vulnerability.  The drama was genuinely oppressive, claustrophobic, tense and weird with no rules.

The directors and actors pulled off something visceral and provocative which is no mean feat on a wet night in Prescot.