A plane crash; tanks stopped on Tiananmen Square; a ruler standing on a palatial balcony; the interrogation of the perpetrator of a mass shooting. There Has Possibly Been an Incident consists of three monologues and one dialogue, fractured and woven together. The success of Chris Thorpe’s new play is that it’s not just about these events but that it formally recreates and examines the cognitive and sequential conditions by which they occur. It’s a remarkable and intelligently unified piece.
This is a play which inhabits the present. Actors sit in front of microphones, holding (if not always reading) their scripts. As they speak, there’s no sense that they’re deliberately building a set of narratives but, rather, each individual snapshot of the present is placed on top of the last and a stratified story emerges. These stories are composed of repetition and coordination; the audience is left to do a lot of work discerning the relationships between each moment, translating them into something more familiar and perceivable. This style gives the characters a certain optimism - they’re living entirely in each individual moment, imbued with possibility and potential, unhindered by the disappointments of the past or the fixed answers of the future.
It’s a style which also allows Thorpe to zoom in and out, from the smallest possible component of each situation - the personal, individually human experience - to their cosmic, symbolic implications. A man standing in front of a tank, rooted to the ground by his shopping, has an effect because of ‘what he has made himself mean’ - but, as Thorpe intercedes, ‘fuck all that, because this is a guy standing in front of a tank.’
There’s a great deal in this play that is in its own conversation with A Conversation With My Father, another production at Northern Stage at St Stephens - the relationship between the personal and the political, the fact that, in this universe, humanity might be ‘the only thing that cares’, where each human has the individual potential to change things, to act. Thorpe’s play, however, is less definite, less sure of our own ability to achieve the outcomes we might strive towards.
The design and staging are particularly appropriate to what’s going on in the play - blinds run along the back of the seated actors; we’re on the threshold of something, there’s something behind them that we can’t yet see, and we’re being held in an indefinite waiting room. The scripts and the microphones add to the sense of disconnect, and whilst the mode of delivery is cold and clinical, it’s got a frightening precision and clarity; we’re detached from the immediate action of the stories but they’re being relayed to us with extraordinary force.
This is a truly impressive, difficult piece of theatre that demands a great deal of concentration from its audience. It powerfully dramatises the uncertainty of the mechanisms of change, and the tentative effects of human action and reaction upon the events of the world. It’s a play set in the present, for the present.
