‘You can tell the bits, but can never complete the picture.’ The final sentiment of Magnet Theatre’s Voices Made Night reflects the nature of a show composed of fragmentary short stories. Voices Made Night offers continual glimpses and revelations of human interactions and relationships. It is a precisely energetic, provocative piece of physical theatre which suggests rather than clarifies, probes rather than resolves.
Setting and culture are integral, not contextual, to the production. Mia Couto’s stories, upon which the play is based, maintain a folkloric strangeness and authority whilst at the same time portraying a contemporary community. The characters are not only types and symbols, but real people. The society is rigid and stratified - everyone is poor, but some people are poorer than others. Throughout, female characters are controlled by convention, and those who step out of their accepted roles are feared and mistrusted.
The company are an impressive and unified ensemble, each of them able to stand out as a vivid character or recede into expressive choric roles as the situation sees fit. One actor stands apart from the group, signifying the writer himself. He looks on engrossed and often surprised by his own creations; sometimes he feeds them lines, but sometimes the relationship is inverted, and the characters seize their own agency. ‘Life is a web weaving a spider’, one character says - so too is this story often seen weaving its author.
The final story, in which an old man digs a grave for his ageing wife, is markedly the best of the show - it’s dark, comic, and profoundly simple. Occasionally the other stories lose their narrative clarity as the characters shift - and the deliberately unresolved endings don’t help the overall momentum of the production - yet the sincere and rigorous psychological integrity maintained throughout is enough to provide the necessary unity.
It would have been preferable to have been closer to the action: we can see the chalk-dust billow from the actors’ bodies, but we can’t quite feel it. Perhaps, too, there is more stylised labour and strain than is quite necessary - very occasionally the performance style overbears the simplicity of the stories.
Voices Made Night is an intelligently selected, structured and devised production. It is consistently stimulating and engaging, and provokes its audience members to complete the picture of the community themselves.
