Draw three curved lines.  Move them in infinite space.  Random and pointless yet purposeful and with motivation unchanged.  Eventually these three lines will fall near each other and create a shape that the human brain can complete.  Probably a broken circle.

NIGHT SLOWS DOWN has three protagonists.  Their lines cross as they are propelled by their own motivation but the audience will not see the shape complete until the final scene.  By Phillip James Rouse, the play was written as world politics shifted and fears around the theocratic, racist, elitist rise of the right grew.  And it is chilling.  Drawn breath, head shaking dialogue and how dare they viewing.

Tension is immediate as two grown siblings meet in a formless place.  Seth and Sharon obviously have a weary history.  It’s the cause of their long estrangement but when shared experience pulls them toward each other again, dams long built can also be destroyed.  Sharon’s husband Martin is fearful of Seth being back in their lives.  The time is now and as the right rises, Seth will become an apparatchik of bigotry based progress.  Martin is of the disappeared.

Superbly penned, this play bristles with a subtext that allows a viewer to recognize themes from other depictions of totalitarian or dystopian futures without be distracted by comparisons.  The language builds as the story does and the use of management terms like ‘incentives’ clash violently with the misuse of ‘justice’. ‘The Government’ is used often and with loathsome indifference to any will of the people.

The pettiness of Seth as bureaucrat is so well managed by Andre de Vanny.  When at his most unpleasant, blackmailing and indifferent, his hands touch his face as if looking for boils to appear.  Other times with his hands in his pockets and his chest cockerel open, he exudes the ineptitude of the desperately motivated.  He can appear only capable of vicious and inhuman realpolitik but the underlying ineffectiveness is clear and present.

Danielle King as Sharon balances the outrage and disgust with female-centric motivations around loss and grief.  Her choices never appear easy, she doesn’t give us a Sharon who is comfortable as the voice is the wilderness.  The effort is effortlessly evident in her characterisation especially when she recognizes the badly behaved young brother in the imperious arsehole who stands above her.  There is a telephone scene which is electric with her ambivalent attitude to dissent.  It may put Martin in harm’s way.

Martin is a pivot point for Seth and Sharon’s story and Johnny Nasser avoids any cliché of victimhood or goodness.  His humanity is expressed with his flaws and stressors always available to the audience and his pragmatism in the penultimate scene avoids sentimentalisation.  And such well-expressed rapport and genuineness of affection between he and Sharon.  There is a sweet scene between them on the floor which is so seductive and loving that I was slightly embarrassed to be eavesdropping.

Martin is mostly clad only in socks, vulnerable.  Which leads to discussion of the production elements of NIGHT SLOWS DOWN.

The text is fractured, there is the now and there is the then.  This is not a show for passive imbibement and a cohesive environment which clues the watcher in is vital.   This production is so rich, yet so lacking in overt detail, that an audience is invisibly guided to the emotion of the moment.

Props are formed but blank and audience engagement is required to see what they see.  The symbolism of the set is only available to the viewer at the denouement of the production.  However, the power and beauty of these amber slabs of modern art with gouache-like rendering gave me the same lost, sinking feeling that I get from the starker works of Mel Briggs.

Lighting that pools eerily or hits the cast at body height so that shadows walk the walls as the characters’ restlessness propels them.  Lighting which is generally used in theatre to make the space visible is suddenly all too bright and neon redolent.  With the audience on each side washed too.  Ergo we are complicit.

The audio is so understated in places, there is almost imperceptible bass reverberation when Seth and Sharon hug after she reluctantly accepts a position of his making.  It’s unsettling and later, during a difficult phone call with a Minister, the same shifting rumble has all the import of infrastructure failing around them.  There are instruments evoked within the electronica, also.  The vaguely organ pipe feel under the discussion of their father’s death was pinpoint emotion.  Loud ness too can cut across the sudden darkness to disturb and presage. (Production Design Anna Gardiner & Martelle Hunt; Lighting Design Sian James-Holland; Audio Design Phillip James Rouse)

The flow of the production is beautifully controlled by Rouse who also directs.  Cast move to accommodate the traverse sightlines with the simplicity of passion.  Especially of note is how the scene changes are handled.  No settling.  Just lights up to catch characters in motion.  Audiences to join the lines and put the scenes in perspective.

When we were young and wanted to see what lay beyond the paling fence, we swung our head briskly from side to side and let our brain put the images together as one scene.  NIGHT SLOWS DOWN requires similar cognition.  It is theatre which might, one future day, need us to remember how we felt and what actions were not resisted before the shape was unassailably formed.

NIGHT SLOWS DOWN continues at Kings Cross theatre until December 9.  For more information visit:

http://www.kingsxtheatre.com/night-slows-down/