By Heart

Smock Alley Theatre

****

In a world where most of us memorise nothing more poetic than passwords and pin numbers, what is the point of a theatre piece built around the spectacle of 10 people learning a Shakespeare sonnet by heart?

I say “theatre piece”, but early in this 90-minute show the actor and director of the Portuguese National Theatre, Tiago Rodrigues, tells the audience that if they’ve come in search of “theat-AH”, they’re doomed to disappointment. That’s just before he points to the 10 empty chairs on stage, asks for volunteers to occupy them, and adds that until the chairs are all taken the performance can’t begin.

It's a smart psychological strategy; the first of many from Rodrigues in an evening which ought, in terms of thrills and spills, to be roughly on a par with watching paint dry. In fact, By Heart is an emotional roller-coaster, its onstage "action" underpinned by a cleverly-paced narrative that encompasses George Steiner's literary philosophy, Rodrigues's 94-year-old grandmother, who is gradually losing her eyesight, Nadezhda Mandelstam in her kitchen, teaching her husband's banned poems to 10 people at a time, and the prophet Ezekiel being ordered to eat a Biblical scroll before going out to preach a message of hope and defiance.

Rodrigues’s message, like Ezekiel’s, is political – a cry from the heart against the outsourcing of our culture to faceless geopolitical forces, whether fascist ideologies or internet search engines. The apparent artlessness of the actor’s chosen weapon – the memorising of a piece of text – turns out to be both subtle and powerful.

Because it’s subtle, I didn’t appreciate the potency (or, indeed, the ruthlessness of iambic pentameter) until, teeth gritted, I found myself about to yell at one of the hapless “performers”: “Finish the line, for Chrissakes! Finish the bloody line!”

With a different "cast", the remaining performances of By Heart will be different shows. This one was funny, tense, moving and strangely satisfying. Also shocking. How hard can it be to learn a sonnet, you ask? Hah. Wanna try?

Ends Saturday 26th