vessel

vessel is about how we gain and maintain stability in the unstable world of contested narratives, alternative facts and irreversible consequences. The original production was created with four performers and the poetic and political script utilised polyphony. In 2022 vessel was reworked as a duet performed by Sue MacLaine with live sound mixing by Owen Crouch and was performed as part of the Recycling Plant evening curated by Emergency Chorus at Camden People’s Theatre in London

vessel was originally co-commissioned by the Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts and Battersea Arts Centre and premiered October 2018.

Original cast:Tess Agus, Angela Clerkin, Kailing Fu, Karlina Grace Paseda

The performance uses creative captioning throughout, designed by digital artist Giles Thacker so is accessible to deaf and hard of hearing audiences.

An original score by Owen Crouch accentuates the themes of radical aloneness and radical togetherness and underpins the delicate choreography of Seke Chimutengwende. Ben Pacey’s luscious set and Holly Murray’s costumes re-imagine the Anchoress and her cell for the 21st century.

REVIEWS

“The feelings that words create, rather than their meaning, come to the fore in this quietly revealing piece”

— MIRIAM GILLINSON MON 12 NOV 2018, THE GUARDIAN

Four peaceful-looking women sit on chairs in a cramped stage space. Grainy light seeps through three small windows. An orange screen above the women is filled with a stream of projected words, which the women recite. The phrasing is fractured, overlapping and untethered. Glimmers of meaning occasionally wriggle free, but meaning isn’t really the point. Vessel is a chance for the audience to step away from reality and get lost, perhaps escape, together.

Read the full review at the Guardian online

“MacLaine crafts a sentence the way a composer crafts a melody: subtly changing tone, timbre, pitch and emotion through the full spectrum of the actresses’ voices.”

— NATASHA SUTTON WILLIAMS - NOVEMBER 17 2018, DISABILITY ARTS ONLINE

In vessel, Sue MacLaine has created a quietly hypnotic show utilising the bodies and voices of four different women from different backgrounds, races and experiences. With their voices she composes a musical quartet using words that repeat, overlap and interweave. Sometimes a single voice is heard, at other times all four voices create a polyphony of sound.

Read the full review at Disability Arts Online

REVIEW FROM THE STAGE, SICK! FESTIVAL 2015

BY BELLA TODD

27 MARCH 2015

Sue MacLaine’s Can I Start Again Please is an extraordinarily eloquent piece about silence and childhood sexual abuse, burning with anger, yet beautifully choreographed and powerfully controlled. MacLaine is a well-known BSL interpreter for theatre, and signed and spoken English sit side by side as she and Nadia Nadarajah test the limits of language. From the quoting of Wittgenstein (“Whereof one cannot speak...”) as a sort of throat-clearing exercise to the small bell ringing so frantically the clapper stuck in its throat, the layers of meaning are tightly packed. Watching the two women sign the difference between ‘repression’ and ‘dissociation’, you feel you are watching the mainstream emergence, at last, of a vital theatrical language.

REVIEW FROM DISABILITY ARTS ONLINE, SICK! FESTIVAL 2015

27 MARCH 2015

'Can I Start Again Please?' is a play about language and the capacity to comprehend and articulate traumatic experience. The work was commissioned to be part of the Sick! Festival in Brighton and Manchester. Review by Colin Hambrook

A bell sits behind reams of folded paper piled up on the floor between two pairs of feet.

Sue MacLaine's 'Can I Start Again Please?' features a bell and reams of folded paper

This year SICK! Festival has pushed the boundaries of reflective, difficult theatre-going to the darkest corners of human experience with an emphasis on performance exploring themes of abuse and suicide. From the packed audiences at all the shows in the festival it is clear there is an appetite for issue-based theatre that tackles taboos head-on.

Sue MacLaine’s two-hander Can I Start Again Please? is written, performed and staged with an incredible attention to detail. It’s as if the sculptural image for this performance were lifted straight from a Vermeer painting. Think ‘Girl With A Pearl Earring’ and you’ll have an instant iconic sense of the atmosphere conveyed through the set design and costume for what is essentially a static piece of theatre.

Sue MacLaine and Nadia Nadarajah are sisters presenting a precise and exacting duologue, written in English and BSL. Exploring communication; the play is about the myriad ways in which we understand each other, or not.

The writing unveils a persistent emphasis and reassurance gained by the use of repetition. “You will not be harmed this evening” we are told. What we are to experience is the aftermath of trauma, an intense 50 minute snow-dive into the impact of living with abuse perhaps half a decade after the act; the point at which ‘he’ was no longer a father.

Honed with great dignity and presence the story within the performance unravels slowly through inference rather than straightforward narrative. With slow deliberation MacLaine and Nadarajah take hold of their audience and shake us to the core as an underlying anger seeps through explanations of the differences between English and BSL. A dynamic theatrical language unfolds as we are shown explicitly the BSL for ‘repression’ and ‘dissociation.’

When MacLaine tells us apropos of nothing that “there is an unexpected item in the bagging area” we are confronted with layers of meaning that become all the more heightened with dramatic tension through the time taken to translate the idiom into BSL.

As audience we are taken on an internal journey through the authors’ struggle to survive and lift herself above the light into a life that contains a learnt language surrounded with shame, taboo and silence.

REVIEW FROM DISABILITY ARTS ONLINE, SICK! FESTIVAL 2015

27 MARCH 2015

'Can I Start Again Please?' is a play about language and the capacity to comprehend and articulate traumatic experience. The work was commissioned to be part of the Sick! Festival in Brighton and Manchester. Review by Colin Hambrook

A bell sits behind reams of folded paper piled up on the floor between two pairs of feet.

Sue MacLaine's 'Can I Start Again Please?' features a bell and reams of folded paper

This year SICK! Festival has pushed the boundaries of reflective, difficult theatre-going to the darkest corners of human experience with an emphasis on performance exploring themes of abuse and suicide. From the packed audiences at all the shows in the festival it is clear there is an appetite for issue-based theatre that tackles taboos head-on.

Sue MacLaine’s two-hander Can I Start Again Please? is written, performed and staged with an incredible attention to detail. It’s as if the sculptural image for this performance were lifted straight from a Vermeer painting. Think ‘Girl With A Pearl Earring’ and you’ll have an instant iconic sense of the atmosphere conveyed through the set design and costume for what is essentially a static piece of theatre.

Sue MacLaine and Nadia Nadarajah are sisters presenting a precise and exacting duologue, written in English and BSL. Exploring communication; the play is about the myriad ways in which we understand each other, or not.

The writing unveils a persistent emphasis and reassurance gained by the use of repetition. “You will not be harmed this evening” we are told. What we are to experience is the aftermath of trauma, an intense 50 minute snow-dive into the impact of living with abuse perhaps half a decade after the act; the point at which ‘he’ was no longer a father.

Honed with great dignity and presence the story within the performance unravels slowly through inference rather than straightforward narrative. With slow deliberation MacLaine and Nadarajah take hold of their audience and shake us to the core as an underlying anger seeps through explanations of the differences between English and BSL. A dynamic theatrical language unfolds as we are shown explicitly the BSL for ‘repression’ and ‘dissociation.’

When MacLaine tells us apropos of nothing that “there is an unexpected item in the bagging area” we are confronted with layers of meaning that become all the more heightened with dramatic tension through the time taken to translate the idiom into BSL.

As audience we are taken on an internal journey through the authors’ struggle to survive and lift herself above the light into a life that contains a learnt language surrounded with shame, taboo and silence.