Anglofritz Theatre Review – The Promised Land by Kenn Phillips
Anglofritz is loosening its cultural bootstraps this weekend by reviewing a brand new play by British playwright Kenneth Phillips.
Kenneth Phillips’ liquefying new drama, which opened at the English Theatre Berlin last week, scrawls dark landscapes of raw emotion across the unforgiving backdrop of the modern world. Sitting amongst the stunned audience in the embryonic space that is the English Theatre, I felt Phillips’ sensitive, sparse lyricism crack and separate on my skull like the atoms of a tragedy all the more tragic for its very simplicity. Metaphor collapses on allegory, verse disperses among prose, realism crashes against the rocks of the lyric impulse, and they drown together in a melancholic, choleric, perhaps even pastoral, ecstasy.
What do we see on this small, exquisite stage? We see a man and we see a woman. We see a suitcase. We see a detached prism of light. All this hardly seems enough to provide such an intense performance of shared eroticism. But what doors of perception do we enter so uncertainly and then pass through so euphorically? Our nerves seem charged with rare electricity. We are exposed to the bitterness and the euphoria of a love that we have all experienced, but few of us can touch without injury. As the actors twist their bodies and lift their psyches through the harrowing experience that Phillips has had the sheer monumental guts to coax them through, it seems foolish even to ask the usual questions that critics ask.
In one brutal, coruscating scene, the male partner recklessly pummels the suitcase – which becomes an exiled symbol of release – and we are drawn into a sudden concatenation of vital horror that flashes across the stage, seconds that are too painful even to feel, and are suddenly gone. The dress hanging within the suitcase seems all the more fragile for its detachment from the warmth of the female partner. This delicate garment hovers in its tender moorings, and then it too is gone - a suffering, gentle, erotic angel.
Quite simply, this extremely new play by this extremely promising new playwright offers perhaps the most intimate account of private desolation in the last few years.
The Promised Land has been selected at this year’s Dublin Fringe Festival, which runs from 9th – 26th September, and may also be revived at the English Theatre in Berlin next season.