In some ways,
Ramesh Meyyappan's mime productions are a reminder of how little is
required to create compelling theatre: a performer, a space, an hour.
But they are also a reminder of how much is needed: an acute sense of
character, story and pacing; charisma; passion; majestic talent.
In Gin and Tonic and Passing Trains, Meyyappan freely adapts
Charles Dickens' The
Signal-Man, a short story in which one of Dickens' naïve,
well-meaning everymen (think Nicholas Nickleby) interviews a railway
signalman plagued by ghostly apparitions. In transforming this staid,
literary two-hander into a vibrantly visual one man show, Meyyappan
and director Mark Smith dispense with the narrator character and play
very loosely indeed with their source material. Ironically, in doing
so, they make it more Dickensian. You'd expect Dickens, the great social
critic, the writer of Oliver Twist and David Copperfield,
to examine how the signal-man's working conditions - his long years
of boredom, trapped in a dingy signal box - lead to his insanity and
the ghostly visions that precipitate his death. But, although Dickens
briefly considers this, he ultimately declares supernatural forces as
the cause of the signal-man's tragedy.
Meyyappan is far more interested in natural causes, and he presents
us with the moving emotional journey of this stationary individual.
We begin with hope and humour. We see the newly employed signalman arrive
at his dilapidated signal box and engage in a good-natured struggle
to make it liveable. The light bulb is not his friend. The bats in the
rafters resist him. But the signal-man loves his tiny new home - we
see his delight in a simple cup of tea or in the folding mechanism of
his wall bed - and he potters about, haphazardly but with a certain
doggedness, until the lights are lit, the bats are banished, and the
railway points are oiled and gleaming.
This is the simplest and least eventful of narratives, and few performers
would be able to make it as enchanting as Meyyappan did. Obviously,
there is delight in seeing Meyyappan create the world around him: conjuring
books and beds and boilers out of thin air, and becoming many of the
creatures and objects he interacts with. For example, I defy anyone
to keep from grinning when he transforms himself into a cupboardful
of resentful bats. But there is more to his performance than the mime's
ability to make something out of nothing: Meyyappan is able to pull
off a magic trick I have never seen anyone manage before. Somehow he
is able to invest in his character fully, living every moment onstage
afresh, while simultaneously he steps apart from his character and seems
almost to sit down next to you, whispering in your ear and drawing your
attention to the best bits. It's like watching a DVD with the world's
most helpful commentary track.
I don't know how he does this, but I do know it enables him to create
some magical moments of theatre. At one point, Meyyappan stuck out his
left arm, palm upwards, and waggled his fingers. I immediately knew
this was a plume of smoke from a distant steam train and, synecdochically,
the train itself. I must clarify: the gesture looked nothing like a
train. Granted, I would have eventually worked out what it signified
from context and from what happened next - but I didn't need to work
it out: I understood immediately. This was because while Meyyappan the
performer was making his abstract gesture onstage, Meyyappan the commentator
was sitting beside me and whispering, like a teacher, to me, his eager
student, "Look: a train!"
And inside the train was a tiny world. Another thing I find magical
about Meyyappan's performances is that I can never be sure whether he
actually mimed the things I remember seeing or whether I came up with
them myself. For example, I think he mimed an old gent making his way
to his seat, and a small child playing in the buffet car. On the other
hand, I'm fairly sure he didn't mime a waiter carrying a stack of plates
and rocking with the gentle motion of the train. But I see all of this
anyway: I see the old man's white beard, dun tweeds and stick; the child's
fair hair; the waiter's look of concentration. And even if I misremember
and he did mime all of these, then I supplied the soundtrack myself,
and I can still hear the old man's apologetic grunts, the child's giggles,
the clink of the waiter's china. Again, synecdoche: Meyyappan focuses
precisely on a small detail and lets his audience fill in the rest of
the picture.
As the signal-man watches this life-filled train pass by, you sense
that he is part of it. He is a friend to the passengers, a comrade to
the driver - all share the same destination. But then the train passes
and all its life goes with it. The signal-man's face falls and he turns
back to his shack, but it is clean and empty and there is nothing to
do.
Dickens' short story takes place over the last two days of the signal-man's
life, so the crushing boredom that must compose his daily existence
is merely alluded to and inferred by the reader. Meyyappan shows it
directly. He sits against a wall in his shack and, in the sinking of
his shoulders, gravity doubles. In the aspect of his arms, the temperature
drops. In the blank, brokenness of his expression, ten years are condensed
into a minute. Time, like trains, can shrink to a single image.
It is here that Meyyappan and Smith add a plot point not found in Dickens'
original: the signal-man turns to drink. Naturally, Meyyappan is a wonderful
stage drunk. He rolls around his shack with a look of sodden glee on
his face. He seems to make friends with the floor, the chairs, the bed
- ribbing them and laughing at imagined jokes. We see how gin is a too
bright, too shallow substitute for the human fellowship he too briefly
shares with the passengers of passing trains. Beneath the broad comedy
of the performance, we sense a Dickensian outrage that people were once
made to live under these conditions.
And in among these bright, loud images, something dark and silent:
the signal-man glimpses the figure of a man with one arm in front of
his eyes and the other waving above his head. He is disturbed by the
image - well, it is disturbing: somehow it is flat and barren
while everything else is rounded with life. This image recurs throughout
the piece and its appearances were the only times when I didn't know
exactly what was going on (I had not yet read Dickens' story). Indeed,
the second time the image occurred, I asked my friend beside me what
it meant. He didn't know. The third time I saw it, I realised that I
was not meant to understand it yet, but, ironically, I finally understood
it: Meyyappan was foreshadowing the signal-man's fate - the image was
him, waving at an oncoming train, blinded by its headlights, desperately
trying to stop it crashing due to a points failure his drunken negligence
has caused.
This strikes me as a very brave choice. Although I was able to follow
everything Meyyappan did, I had to work hard to do so, never taking
my eyes from the stage for a second. Of course, that's part of the thrill:
the mime artist works with you to create something out of nothing, and
the images you then see are the reward for your efforts. But when you
try and fail to see, as I did the first two times with the waving figure,
you feel let down or incompetent. You worry that you will fail to see
again. You worry that you have missed something important. Meyyappan
surely knows this. But such is his confidence as a performer that he
knew he could immediately assuage the audience's worries and draw them
right back into the story. And then when the true nature of the waving
figure was revealed, the payoff would be all the greater.
The signal-man sacrifices his life to save the train, and we then see
him wake into the afterlife, still in his train-wrecked body. He pulls
back his spilled guts into his stomach. He reattaches his peeled-off
face. These mimed images were so graphic that the audience collectively
gasped, but they were also, unavoidably, comic - indeed, I can't remember
a funnier time at the theatre than a similar sequence in Meyyappan and
Smith's 2005 show, This
Side Up. But here I thought the comedy misplaced. Meyyappan
had created a real frisson with the waving figure and had earned a moment
of true pathos with the signal-man's self-sacrifice. It seemed a shame
to undermine the purity and power of the moment with laughter.
But this is the only quibble I have with a production that was otherwise
sheer delight from start to finish. Those of you who have not yet seen
one of Meyyappan's shows, hold your heads in shame and place a standing
order with SISTIC. He may be the best we have.
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"Somehow Meyyappan is able to invest in his character fully, living
every moment onstage afresh, while simultaneously he steps apart from
his character and seems almost to sit down next to you, whispering in
your ear and drawing your attention to the best bits"
Credits
Ramesh Mayyappan - Performer
Mark Smith - Director
Paul Skinner - Music Director
Justin M Breman - Lighting Designer
Richard Kent - Set Designer
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