Near Gone: 400 flowers of summer

The lights come up over an empty stage strewn with four hundred freshly cut flowers and two figures step out from the front row to greet their audience. This sets the stage for Near Gone, a play for which the company, Two Destination Language, won the 2013 Pulse Fringe Suitcase Prize. The production stars Katherina Radeva and Alister Lownie as themselves, in a highly personal account of a chapter in their own history.

The production took on an intriguing style of performance. Radeva spoke, or struggled to speak, in her native Bulgarian to Lownie, who then translated her sentiments to the audience. At first, this was entertaining and it prevented the start of the play from simply being a soliloquy delivered by Radeva, prolonging her story and establishing the relationship between the two characters. The language barrier cemented a sense of ineffability, which at times encouraged laughter and at others kept secrets from the audience.

But this technique had its drawbacks and chief among them was how much it was used to drag the performance out. A third of the way in, we were no closer to finding out the subject of the play than when we first entered. The only information of relevance to be disclosed at this point was the setting: a hot summer’s day in Bulgaria. But the worth of this knowledge seemed disproportionately small to the amount of effort it took to gain it. Despite the visual elements of the play and its clever delivery, the beginning of the play conveyed almost no perceivable plot development.

The play maintained the same, slow pace. Radeva dealt with increasing agitation, through her reluctance and even inability to speak, resorting instead to body language, which was expressed in English by Lownie. Her frustration manifested itself in using the sole props of the play. With a bouquet in each hand and vibrant gypsy music dripping out of the speakers, she began a desperate and destructive dance. This was an aesthetically powerful display, sending shredded flower heads and stalks flying about the stage as it became both more and less barren. The scene repeated itself several more times, with a few alterations such as the number of bouquets destroyed, until finally the sole incident of the play was revealed.

Radeva’s four-year-old sister was found unconscious in the family’s garden, the performance’s central and only solid narrative content. It was unclear what had happened to her, or precisely what state she was in, to the characters on stage and also the audience. Radeva was seen to struggle more and more as she attempted to finish the story, with new information still being repeated a number of times before we heard it described in full.

The second half of Near Gone fully exposed its weaknesses. The grief and confusion portrayed did seem sincerely experienced by the characters but the audience remained detached from it. The relationship between Lownie and Radeva became increasingly intimate, while the audience was progressively excluded. At one point, as Radeva danced herself into a state of exhaustion, Lownie begged the audience to help her. Of course, no audience member would intervene, so it was left to Lownie to offer comfort. This use of direct audience address, instead of offering real audience engagement, emphasised the audience’s position as an observing community distanced from the characters on stage.

The performance finished abruptly. After only twenty minutes of build-up that could barely be called suspense, we were told that Radeva’s sister did eventually wake up. There was palpable relief from onstage but no such emotion was evoked strongly in the audience. I was left merely with a feeling of discomfit, as though I had spent an hour peering through someone’s fence, or into their child’s hospital room, for voyeuristic entertainment.

Near Gone is touring throughout Spring 2014, more details can be found here.