Suspect Culture Project: Timeless (1997)

"My voice is not high.
My voice is not crackly.
Today God has reached down and pulled all the stupid words from my throat.
He's taken them to the beach we went to that one time.
And he's thrown them on that fire."

Timeless is one of Suspect Culture's indisputably great shows. It was a landmark for the company, as the piece was commissioned by the Edinburgh International Theatre Festival, an unusual honour for such a young company. The production was distinguished by the remarkable ambition of all involved; the spare, witty, aching text by David Greig; the sombre, majestic string quartets composed by Nick Powell; the grand and resonant sets provided by Ian Scott; a very strong cast who would make repeated appearances in future SC shows; the whole thing given haunting clarity by Graham Eatough's direction.

It has the simplest of themes - a reunion of four college friends - but it turns this simple story into a profound meditation on friendship, honesty, and time. The show's structure is extremely clear and yet it is not a structure that closes off interpretations or explains the action of the play. It is a structure that prompts emotional and intellectual questions to resound well after the performance is over.

The first scene shows the four friends (Veronica, Stella, Ian, and Martin) meeting in a trendy bar after several years apart after college. They reminisce about old times, remembering a time in a bar when they all decided, on the spur of the moment, to get in a car and find a beach, where they bought Indian food and built a fire. A darker tone runs through the scene as we discover that one of the two women seems to have appeared in a pornographic magazine - a 'reader's wives' picture. However, we soon discover that this is not as it appears. ">
The second scene takes us right back to those college days as we see the same four friends; they reminisce about the previous night, and we learn of some guilty secrets. We watch as the idea occurs to them to find a beach and as the scene ends we watch them going off to create memories.
If the first scene is the present, and the second scene is the past, the third scene is the future. It's not as simple as a flash-forward; it seems that what we are seeing is a mixture of everyone's ideal projection of how they would appear to each other, and we watch them repeatedly entering the bar and trying to appear as cool as possible, say the kindest, rightest thing possible. They fail, but they try again. Eventually the four join together in their recollection of that now-mythical night on the beach.

The description sounds rather sombre but while there is a strain of melancholy that runs through the piece, it is also extremely funny, with some wickedly accurate observations of how friends behave together - and indeed how students behave together. Look for the wonderful scene where Martin instructs Ian in the art of seduction. There are also some wonderful observations about ageing - made most clear in a sadly hilarious scene where the friends in their 30s try to recapture the spontaneity of their youth.

A concern that underlies the whole production, and has continued to be central to Suspect Culture's work, is the idea of perfection. It is captured in the final scene where we watch all the characters attempt to be the ideal version of themselves. It is also there in the images of perfect moments, perfect memories, and the way these moments can get trampled in the retelling, even in the remembering. The motif of 'reaching out' became an important key to the gestural language developed for this production. The nervousness and awkwardness of the bar reunion was captured beautifully in a series of gestural motifs based around flinching, apologising, covering your face (see the picture above); but underneath this slyly observed social comedy, there was a persistent affirmation of the desire to reach out, not to apologise. It's given its most delicate and beautiful expression in scene three as Martin imagines Veronica crying, and he imagines how he'll react:

Don't cry.
Please don't cry Veronica.
I'm here now.
You don't have to cry.
You can stop.
(I reach out my hand, with a kind of infinite slowness,
And say the perfect thing.)
He reaches out his hand.
Blah blah blah blah blah blah.

... because, of course, we can't say the perfect thing; as the rest of the show suggests, the very act of representing perfection somehow renders it imperfect. Like a photograph left out in the sun, the image fades. So perhaps we can only let these nonsense words stand in for it. But in a curious way, Suspect Culture are trying to represent this unprepresentable and that's a key to many of their later shows: the search for the perfect woman in Casanova, the ironic images of utopia on Candide 2000, the recognition of the degraded notion of all communication in Lament, and the moment of literally climactic sublimity in their most recent show 8000m.

The show is set in recognisable contemporary spaces and is written in an economical, lyrical but eminently accessible style. The show was a great success at the Edinburgh Festival and the production - in an altered version (the original third act was less poetic than the second) - was toured, including a brief run at the Donmar Warehouse in London. (This was in fact the first of their shows to be performed professionally in London.)