REVIEW: SPUR - Cavern, VAULT Festival
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
SPUR – Cavern, VAULT Festival
Writer: Matt Neubauer
Director: James Nash
Reviewer: Emily Beech
This has been my first (and hopefully not, funding dependent, my last) experience of the VAULT Festival. And its ambitious for any maker or company to make theatre for a choice of venues that live under a railway bridge, but of everything I’ve seen at the vaults, SPUR not only ‘works’ (whatever that means) in its venue, but actually lives and breathes in this space in a way that no other piece at this festival does.
SPUR is a three-handed western spliced with fragments of something that is certainly not a western; the central story framing this piece being a revenge-fuelled journey led by Sadie (Maddy Strauss) to recover her father’s stolen spurs. Her companions are John (George Fletcher) and Isaac (Benjamin Victor). They each break from the western story at various points into what we recognise as ‘real’ characters (i.e., people who are definitely not cowboys), and address us in stark, confessional monologues in the performer’s native accents. As enjoyable as the three-handed parts of SPUR are, the solo ‘breaks’ are where Neubauer’s writing particularly shines. All three performers are – and I never use this word – dazzling. They each breathe a unique life into their double-sided roles, switching effortlessly between accents and energies alike.
SPUR’s design is incredibly elegant. At the forefront of the visual design is the use of projection, not only enabling a fully surtitled performance (fringe opera companies please take note) but also casting the space in a dusty light that perfectly implies the landscape of a John Wayne film. And it is snippets of these films which are splashed onto the central, furthermost wall by this projector, cut with brief montages of shaky, handheld home video that underpin the sections of confessional speech by Sadie. This lighting (Ben Kulvichit) and video (Allberto Lais) is tied together effortlessly by compositions by Nat Norland, which complement the modernism we see onstage while paying homage to the genre that inspires this piece.
It is not a simple piece to follow, and nor should it be. It is dream-like and hazy; we understand that SPUR is about loss, and from this point of understanding onwards we can simply experience everything that follows without demanding something easy or explicit. Grief and loss are neither of these things. James Nash and Matt Neubauer have collaborated to make something that strikes a perfect, careful balance between paying homage and moving (…spurring?) forward. I truly hope that SPUR has a life after this festival, because more people need to see it.