The first of two Howard Barker plays, showing under the portmanteau title of The Promise Of Sex, lives up to that label. The Twelfth Battle Of Isonzo has two characters obsessed with the idea and anticipation of sex with each other, but it is to prove a frustrating mirage.
The man is old and desiccated, the woman only 17, and both are blind. She appears first, dressed in bridal clothes and tapping her way with a cane she soon breaks and throws away. He arrives in a rumpled black suit, with two white sticks he also discards, saying opaque things about not needing them.
They begin a long conversation, touching on their lack of sight and the relationship, mostly sexual, to come.
It becomes apparent that the man is a voluptuary, addicted to titillation, and that she is at first a willing partner. Their duelling dialogue is thick with abstractions and oblique exchanges, studded with occasional points of contact that connect the listener to recognisable emotional realities.
In general, though, the author puts the audience through a mill of verbiage, including a share of crudities, to arrive at his meanings. It is a difficult grind.
By the rather contrived ending, I had not absorbed the play to any satisfying extent. It remained, for me, largely an exercise in pinched eroticism that was not fostered by the actress having to play much of it almost naked.
Antoinette Walsh walked this tightrope with maturity and poise to give an impressive performance. David Ian Rabey's every word and gesture suggested a decay of mind and body, a libido turned in on itself.
The author directed the 80-minute play, and it seemed his actors gave him all that is there to give. I have seen and appreciated enough of Barker's works to be reluctant to dismiss this one, but I must at least opt out of praising it.
Runs until August 11th (1850-260027)
