Review: We Long Endure

I am not sure if We Long Endure is a difficult play to write about because it was operating on a hereto undiscovered philosophical plane, or because it was simply nonsensical. Five characters, nameless and therefore not, apparently, people, take refuge in a basement around a broken laptop to escape from the unbearable stimuli of modern life. In trying to detach themselves, they only drift further into lonely existential torpor. The play is built on the idea that our impressions of other people are unreliable expressions of our own subjectivity.

In the words of writer-director, Dominic Kimberlin, ‘you can never interact with anything beyond your own interpretations.’ Close identification is impossible because we can never trust that what we hear from people is what they mean or, indeed, whether those people exist at all. Discerning readers might detect a hint of Beckett. Dramatic action is limited to a single indistinct place, communication only serves to reinforce isolation, and a motif of waiting recurs throughout. Kimberlin complicates things even further by throwing some Daoist philosophy into the mix. In the programme, Kimberlin reveals that the five characters are conceptually formed from the five elements, each of which affects another in a certain and predictable way to ensure a cycle of creation and destruction. As you may have gathered, it’s overcomplicated and leaves its audience more bemused than arrested.

This play belies audience identification, seeking to align the audience with the uncertain characters. It does achieve the alienation it seeks, but more because the audience are subjected to the same confusion and boredom as the characters than from any aesthetic effect.  In a moment of wry self-reflexivity Fire (played by Mandarr Brandi, whose performance was most compelling) declares ‘The conversations don’t go anywhere and nothing makes sense’. The circularity and futility of the dialogue reflects the encroaching inanity of communication in the modern age, but it does so with trite pretentiousness. Often the dialogue was so disjointed (and occasionally unintelligible) that the audience was left floundering for any foothold in the plot. If this was intended in order to instill existential angst in the spectators, then it was a lazy device and, worse, an unsuccessful one. The effect was confusion, not agonizing loneliness.

This is not to say the whole thing was ineffective. The original music score by Vahan Solarian illustrated the tacky fakery of the modern age, composed from prefabricated sounds and staid, jerky rhythms. It maintained a background radiation of inauthenticity throughout, an aural equivalent to the overarching symbol of the broken computer. At moments the crushing neuroticism and uncertainty managed to be convincing, particularly in the exchange between Wood and Fire over Wood’s manuscript.

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The play benefitted from some characterization that reflected the complementary yet conflicting nature of each character. Mattia Mariotti conveyed Wood’s nervous depression convincingly with erratic body language and a shrilly ululating voice, while Brandi managed the bullying Fire’s instability with élan. Sadly the other performances were less impressive. Constantin Popov’s performance as Metal was ironically a little wooden, and Josephine Wolfe failed to muster the intensity she summoned in 6 Characters in Search of an Author.

Watching We Long Endure, one experiences the same aura suggested in Kimberlin’s notes – there is something deranged about this play, it has the fractious atmosphere of the ravings of a lunatic. Of course this is a strong part of its success. The play interrogates modern breakdown in communication, and this is integrated in its form. However, the intentions of the play were more apparent, at least to me, in Kimberlin’s notes and interviews preceding the performance than in the finished work itself. The play deals with some fascinating ideas on the individual and communication, most of which I agree with, but it failed to articulate these ideas clearly in performance.

image © We long endure