S-27

Winner of the 2007 Protect the Human Playwriting Competition, S-27 by Sarah Grochala is inspired by the experiences of photographer Nhem En, painter Van Nath, and the testimony of Khmer Rouge survivors. In what was once a classroom, teenager May photographs prisoners. Starved and brutalised, they enter by one door and leave by another, beyond which lie inescapable horrors.

Oddly, however, the set of Stephen Keyworth’s production contains no practical doors. This design choice follows Grochala’s instruction that we should never see the prisoners’ actual exit, but it also undermines her subject’s rootedness in the most appalling and atrocious realities. We watch actors scurrying embarrassedly on and off a not-quite-blacked-out set, when we might be faced with human beings walking through a doorway leading to annihilation.

In fact, just what lies beyond the doors of the photographer’s closed world is a persistent difficulty. The very young company tackle the play’s series of one-on-one encounters with earnestness and clarity, but no discernable sense of what they’re supposed to have suffered – or fear. And it’s unfortunate that some of them end up playing multiple roles, leading to an understandable focus on differentiating their characters, rather than making them ordinary, unremarkable, un-actorly people who just happen to have stumbled into hell.

There are a couple of exceptions to this atmosphere of well-intentioned vagueness. As Col, Tom Reed brings a riskily contemporary edge to his physical bearing and his bitterness. Pippa Nixon’s May has a hunched, defensive, accusing roughness that makes the worst of her actions seem possible, and an intense, ravenous imagining of a landscape beyond prison walls that burns through the closing stages of her performance.

S-27 is a series of fictionalised testimonies, talking heads and tortured images. It would perhaps work better in a staging stripped of scenic realism, focussing simply upon faces, words and photos. But this production represents an uneasy compromise between naturalism and the demands of a limited budget, and the result, while committed and sometimes compelling, lacks detail, credibility and grit.