Stage proves a Valk in the park

THEATRE House/Lights Tramway, Glasgow Run ended A STAGE set with screens, metal wires and laptop computers, iron runways and lights, so many lights. Lights that glide and move with fluidity, mirroring the motion of the actors, filling the space as they slide and skim. "What do I care there is no here or there," intones the arresting lead actress Kate Valk, through layers of warped, cyber-muffled technology. Ladies and gentlemen, the confusion begins.

This is the Wooster Group, cream of New York's theatrical avant garde, creating an aesthetic synthesis of work by sexploitation director Joseph Mawra and arch-modernist Gertrude Stein. House/ Lights takes Stein's interpretation of the Faustian myth and superimposes its text on to visuals from Mawra's 1964 flick Olga's House Of Shame (tagline: "An unspeakable nightmare of eroticism!"), rendered on screen in a distorted version of the original. Actors on the stage mirror the movement of actors on the screen. The audience watches both at once, while lighting and sound reflect and distort, creating the action.

Talk of plot is irrelevant. For this collective, here and there are but postmodern labels. The experience is overwhelming. It is intoxicating, a potentially cold and academic work warmed by the power and skill of the actors, notably Valk. She is wonderfully diverse, a quartet of personalities in a character who is sometimes tragic, always engaging, and sometimes ridiculously funny.

But House/Lights gains its power from the blend of cold abstraction, the smutty melodrama of pop kitsch, and an alarmingly sad rendition of modern day alienation and social schizophrenia.

Nicky Agate

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