Doctor Theatre comes to the Unicorn
Possibly the most extraordinary show currently playing in London is For the Best at the Unicorn, a stunning mixture of art work, installation, backstage tour and promenade performance, devised by professionals working with children on dialysis.
You sit in the foyer and a white curtain is drawn across by a small child. Progressing through white corridors and dressing rooms, you are assailed by temperamental outbursts, the sight of a withdrawn girl cringing in a laundrette, a fraught mother baking cakes, a disturbed boy kicking a cabbage along a corridor.
That boy is given respite on dialysis in a hospital ward where the nurse climbs a rope then walks round the upper walls in a harness. Art house theatre has got under the skin of a disruptive illness and shown its terrible beauty.
All the time, small children from the various London schools involved, including the Evelina Hospital School, usher us quietly through the spaces and finally into the large square black arena — the theatre proper, I think — where the family bonds in tough love, and fairytales, and bed-time antics, while stalked by a black-eyed figure of illness in a skeleton waistcoat.
The most striking thing about the piece — devised and directed by Mark Storor and supported by the Wellcome Trust — is its mixture of charm and violence, the theatrical tension of coping with autistic behaviour, the domestic knock-on effect, the sudden switches between hope and helplessness.
We should all know much more about what other people go through if only to put our own good fortune in perspective, and it’s a rare theatre event that enforces a sense of social empathy to the extent that For the Best does.
But none of that would be effective without the very high standard of performance and concentration by the actors, and indeed the children, and the beauty of many of the scenes and settings.
After eighty minutes we emerged onto the street through the scene dock.The actors took no bows. The theatre staff were diffident. Children blinked in the unaccustomed sunlight. People scurried about their lunchtime business.
We’d been on a strange and disturbing journey but one not easily forgotten.
It made a very pleasant change indeed from the the usual round of theatre going on a critic’s agenda, and proved what can be done when big issue theatre is filtered through an inventive, poetic, and theatrical imagination.
In that respect, it’s possible to view For the Best as a sort of companion piece to Kursk at the Young Vic. And it’s just as well worth seeing and standing through, though you can squat at ground level during the final twenty minutes.