What if you found out that the same young girl/boy you see at the bus stop everyday fantasized about having sex with you? It's a very uncomfortable thought. Children in theatre and film are commonly stereotyped as precocious and innocent, but what about precocious and sexual? This is where Asylum productions lands us right into. Yes, you've read Lolita or seen David Harrower's recent Blackbird and think this familiar territory but what director Donal Gallagher does is draw us right into the subject matter in clever way, as you'll see.Red Lola is a body bending haunting power play on sexuality presented as a simple story told backwards in short, sharp vignettes and delivered in halting murmured English. Lola (Medb Lambert), a pubescent schoolgirl waits for the bus but has a habit of missing it with her tendency to engage in dreamy distractions. Along comes that distraction - Hum (Marcus Bale), as in hum-drum. He's all business; suit, briefcase, married. They wait in silence. The location seems remote. There's just a bench. Lola notices Hum. Lola wants Hum. She raises her skirt a few inches showing her white thighs. Hum is shocked but the fact that he remains there telegraphs the tragedy to follow.Now, when the programme say 'backwards' it is not referring to sequence (as I thought). The actors are rendered into full size puppets by virtue of white porcelain masks on the back of their heads covered with a thin mesh stocking, and, importantly, by having their backs to the audience but with their clothes back to front. Their palms, outward facing, move with careful deliberation just like marionettes. Leaning 'forward' means the actors are actually leaning backwards. Even the bus sign says 'sub'. The inversion is disorienting but not by the simple effect itself, but by creating an abstraction that allows the audience to enter safely into the off-colour sexual dynamics between a man and a child unfolding on the stage. The masks prevents us from reading, or more accurately, misreading any facial gestures and perceive the story as intended.The staging is inseparable from the performance. Olan Wrynn creates a full-size puppet theatre, complete with a rear-lit backdrop (used to great effect with shadow puppetry in a dream sequence) and the whole set is surrounded by red draped fabric. This is for children right? Simple plot? Puppets? Asylum successfully invoke the post-modern theatre experience where expectations are reversed and norms are thrown out the window. The play challenges and arrests thought while seducing the audience with little pretty things. Once the audience is is sufficiently dosed with spectacle, two haunting things happen; once in the middle and then at the end. To say what it is, would rob from the experience but suffice to say that these actions inform and help achieve what the piece asserts. Both actors stretch themselves physically (try sitting down face to the back of a chair to experience it yourself ) and in their performance by immersing themselves in the surreal aesthetic through calibrated movement, despite facing the rear of the stage. At times they even parody their efforts such as when Lola drops a book and they literally bend over backwards to pick it up. Ms. Lambert's Lola evokes a treacherous innocence and gives an expressive performance despite her mask. Mr. Bale expertly shows two very different sides of Hum, in one haunting sequence.But what exactly is it that this show asserts? The programme claims it to be an exploration of sexualized youth but on seeing it, I think the interpretation is wide open. Is the whole thing a real-life girl's day-dream of a faceless man in the minutes before a bus comes? A trap for the audience transformed to voyeurs? Asylum, here, have something greater than conceived and therefore, worthy of the stage and debate.
