Page 564 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

and imaginative in the same way as Nick Payne’s ‘Constellations’ was when it broke new
ground at the Royal Court Theatre in 2012, exploring questions about time, free will,
choice and death. It is of time disappearing an hour per day over 24, disrupting the
balance of nature and the orderly life. Set in an indeterminate historical period and
place, the story relates the effect of famine, drought and human misery on the personal
lives of the characters, the fourth of whom is the clock-keeper (Andrew MacKenzie-
Wicks) whose chief function is to manage the display on the clock-tower stage-right
showing the passage of time and the diminishing hours.

The dramatic narrative is set around the centre-stage dining table of a well-to-do
couple, Violet (Anna Dennis) married to the controlling Felix (Richard Burkhard),
supported by their maid Laura (Frances Gregory). Violet and Felix sit at opposite ends (
reminiscent of the distance Putin keeps from visiting world leaders) while Felix and the
clock-keeper sit adjacent to each other for their conversation about stopping the
disappearance of time, indicating Felix is more concerned with worldly affairs than any
intimacy with his wife. The costumes designed by Cécile Trémolières support the
narrative and character arcs, the static male characters remain in puritanical black
while Violet’s attire changes to show more colour and variety as she comes to assert
herself more, seeing hope and opportunity with the disappearance of the hours that she
hadn’t before. To reinforce the lack of reference to specific time and place, Laura
initially wears a maid’s bonnet suggesting this is provincial 17th century era but then
the men don Elizabethan ruffs, and Violet kneads bread on the table between plastic
milk cartons and supermarket cereal packets.

The backcloth shows a skyscape that changes as the hours disappear, from blue with
white clouds to garish orange, purple and black intimating the arrival of catastrophe. As
we hear how orderly life is breaking down, so too the props are thrown about, aided by
Laura who finally smashes the table after a tree suspended above dropping lower every
day is left fallen across the domestic wreckage. The staging by director Jude Christian
and designer Rosie Elnile is riveting in its focus to assist the narrative, with visual text
beneath the stage in Welsh and English as helpful assistance. A particularly effective
piece of staging was the last occasion we saw the clock-keeper, up on his tower
lamenting the end of time, lit from behind to show on the backdrop as if he was a
hanged man. In view of Felix’ fate, this was a brilliant touch.

Moments in the Alice Birch’s libretto narrative I particularly liked were the
conversation between Felix and the clock-keeper, when Felix wants an explanation and
insists the clock-keeper should give him one, which he can’t. The clock’s mechanisms
are working fine but still an hour gets lost every day. This refers me again the premise
of ‘Constellations’ where contradictory happenings can coexist across multiverses. The
most magical moment was when Violet pulls a length of flax seemingly from the hidden
edge of the long table that was centrepiece just before like everything else it was
wrecked by the entropy of time. Suggesting reference to Macbeth, she wraps it around
her husband’s neck as she prepares him for a dreamless sleep before he is found
hanging from the clock tower, “sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care, the death