70 Hill Lane - Press Reviews

The sound is strident and sinister, far creepier than the spooky organ chords that sometimes accompany it. It’s a noise you imagine a raven might make when being strangled or perhaps that of a scythe slicing swiftly though something unmentionable. Yes, there’s nothing like the sound of household tape being pulled off its roll to bring on a case of the Gothic shudders. Tape is essential in defining the unsettled, haunted world conjured by 70 Hill Lane, a short, truly enchanting work of theatre from London that has materialised, all too briefly, at Performance Space 122, where it remains though January 18. And it’s not even duct tape, which at least has a dark history of being used to seal people’s mouths, that is found here: just plain, see-through sticky tape that is distinctive only for being wider than the sort found on office desks and in kitchen drawers. Yet within 90 minutes, this prosaic substance will metamorphose quite precisely into both the exterior and interior of a poltergeist-occupied house. It will recreate the activities of the unseen spirit as it hurls tiny objects about. And, finally, it will be sculptured into a shimmering creature that may be the poltergeist itself. You are never allowed to forget that this is just ordinary tape that is doing these extraordinary things. It may become something else, and something remarkable at that, but it is always also what it was to begin with. Phelim McDermott’s autobiographical account of his encounter with the supernatural at 15, 70 Hill Lane consistently finds the shadows in the seemingly transparent, the magic (of both white and black varieties) in the mundane. A production of Improbable, which here earns its right to its name, this evocation of things that go bump so bewilderingly is rendered by only three actors: Mr. McDermott, Guy Dartnell and Steve Tiplady. It should also be noted, however, that those rolls of tape and some sheets of newspaper (the Guardian, for the record) assume forms that would qualify them as live performers. Although its subject is the ineffable, subversive forces that disrupt life’s habitual flow, the evening’s tone is jaunty and even at times a shade precious. In fact, those who are allergic to the whimsy particular to the English, who tend to appropriate ghosts in the cuddly way they do the hedgehogs in their gardens, may be initially put off by 70 Hill Lane. But beneath its chipper arts-and-crafts exterior, this show slyly makes a case for the idea that we all effectively haunt our own lives, and that ghost stories and fairy tales are perfectly appropriate forms for depicting everyday existence. As Mr. McDermott notes early on, 70 Hill Lane is about both “now and then”. Its centre is the house where he grew up, and where he and a neighbourhood friend discovered that something unknown was flinging objects about. But the production, which is designed and directed by Lee Simpson and Julian Crouch, also spends a lot of time in Mr. McDermott’s apartment, where alarming things like half-eaten toffees of unknown origin materialise under grotty sofas and door keys are always mysteriously missing. There are other detours, always delivered with conversational casualness; to the hospital bed of Mr. McDermott’s grandmother who, as she approaches death, is transformed from the cosy, passive woman he knew into a creature of startling anger and aggressiveness; to his peering through a keyhole at the woman he loves in bed with another man; to a London party that finds McDermott dancing on the buckling roof of a car with a woman he calls “chaos girl”. He sees a fox hit by a car one night, something that prompts the apparition of a man who speaks a few words of disgruntled eulogy and then disappears. As such scenes accumulate, with Mr. Dartnell and Mr. Tiplady becoming whatever the moment requires them to be (including a singing fantasy version of Mr. McDermott’s parents), the events at 70 Hill Lane, a big house in which “it’s easy to avoid each other”, start to seem less exotic. True, no objects have been levitating in Mr. McDermott’s life since that one baffling day. But the world continues to thwart and surprise and dazzle in unexpected ways, most often with phenomena that seem to sneak in “from the far edge of your awareness”. This production, which was partly created out of improvisation, accordingly has room for the unexpected contingencies that come with each performance. On the night I saw the show, a sticky, ectoplasm-like substance in which Mr. McDermott was cocooned by his partners was more adhesive than it should have been, and this was duly remarked upon. And while the performers do create remarkable effects with tape and newspaper – a human-size, three-dimensional outline of the full three stories of a house, walking effigies that include the ailing grandmother – there is never any attempt to disguise the process of getting there. Colin Grenfell’s deft lighting and Ben Park’s adroitly varied music wonderfully enhance the atmosphere of Mr. McDermott’s narrative, but no one is asking you to forget what you see is an illusion. Indeed, this show suggests, in an eloquent, original and purely theatrical language that transcends the flatness of its spoken words, that the rawest materials of life are themselves so pregnant with mystery and the capacity for change that disguising them is beside the point. Mr. McDermott and his colleagues achieve what sleight-of-hand magicians like David Copperfield cannot: a sense that the natural and the supernatural are really the same thing.

Phelim McDermott has a thing about Sellotape. It may make you wonder if something disturbed him as a boy. It did. His haunted childhood home, Improbable reconstruct entirely from Sellotape; it’s fascinating to watch the bay windows, attics and staircases emerge with geometric flourishes from Steve Tiplady and Guy Dartnell – master object-animators both – while Ben Parks toots ambient tunes, and the Puckish McDermott pads around his reappearing abode, offering up conversational titbits as he goes. But there’s more to this Sellotape fetish than just a kooky idea: to recreate the moment when ‘Polty’ the poltergeist hurls artefacts around chez McDermott, the offending toy-cars, wristwatches and ping-pong balls are stuck to a taut length of tape. The junior Phelim recedes into it, cowering, until it snaps the objects crash to the floor. It’s a thrilling device. Short of phantasmagorical interference, could such a spook be better rendered? Then there’s the newspapers. One broadsheet is crumpled into the persona of McDermott’s gran; his dad hides behind another until McDermott exits the room, at which point his mother and father (Tiplady and Dartnell, hilariously) stir fervently from silence to sing about their ‘willy-woofter’ son. McDermott fils also mentions ‘that article about me in the Guardian’: the show is not only about his haunted youth; it’s about the process of interpreting that formative experience. These several storeys of ’70 Hill Lane’ offer plenty of playful entertainment – director Lee Simpson leaves space for improvisatory indulgences – even if the gleefully shifty air of mystery surrounding both the tale and the telling of it never quite obscures the questionable effort to make Polty a metaphor for McDermott’s lifetime of angst. Nevertheless, it’s a beautifully staged, sprightly coupling of quirky craftsmanship and seductive storytelling, which you’ll find vigorously Sellotaped to your consciousness long after you’ve left the theatre.