During the French Enlightenment, Diderot coined the term ‘fourth wall’ to describe what would be, if one imagines the stage as a three-dimensional box, a missing barrier that enables the audience to see into it. It was no coincidence that the term actually came into popular usage in the 19th century with the advent of theatrical realism and the possibility of lighting the stage electrically, nor that pretty soon revolutionaries like Bertolt Brecht should advocate ‘the breaking of the fourth wall’ - actors breaching the presumed watertight enclosure, acknowledging that they are being watched, reaching out to the audience beyond the proscenium arch. Interiors, inspired by Maeterlinck’s play of that name, plays around with the fourth wall convention, and also with the modernist convention of breaking that convention. In one way the fourth wall is reinforced, actually restored. The actors are literally enclosed in four walls - we see them through a window-simulating glass barrier, and we hear them through it too, in so far as we are able to hear (mostly it’s a matter of lip-reading). In another way the fourth wall is doubly dissolved – we are directly addressed by an actor who wanders around outside the set, and looks in through the windows much as the audience does, yet who is privy to the inner thoughts and motivations of the protagonists, and narrates what they feel, say and do to the audience.
     As if to stress the complete privacy and apparent unobservedness of what is happening onstage, the play opens with an elderly actor (Andrew Melville) walking purposefully across the set minus his trousers, with boxer pants and sock suspenders unembarrassedly revealed. The audience is also allowed to spy on his granddaughter (Sara Lazzaro) preening and primping herself in the mirror, adjusting her pants, and deoderising her armpits and under her skirt. This was all amusing, and an interesting and salutary reminder of what the theatre asks us to assume, and of how they-know-but-don’t-know-what-we-know-but-don’t-know. All the same, I was wondering how on earth the actors and the action would be able to keep us interested, or what could develop along the laid-out lines. Thanks to the consummate skill and discipline of the cast, however, and with a more than usual series of suspensions of disbelief and accomodations demanded from the audience, the production managed to be brilliant.
     It wasn’t just theatrical conventions that were highlighted and questioned, but social conventions, the etiquette of giving, and going out to, dinner. The statutory smirks and grimaces, the exaggerated gratitude, pleasure and surprise deemed due in social situations, have become so engrained in us that, as with the audience’s assumed invisibility in the theatre, we hardly notice them any longer. Here, they were brought into relentless focus, particularly because of the way the audience had to rely on the actors’ visual rather than audible communication, which meant that the actors had therefore to exaggerate their expressions and gestures.
     There was an element of caricature and stylisation in this, but as the audience became acclimatised to it, the human particularity of the situation and of each of its protagonists burst through the carapace of actorly caricature and through the conventions of the characters they acted. At first, as the various guests entered, each carrying a rifle or pistol (apparently to protect themselves against polar bears) which they were relieved of by the host, they were all ingratiating and enthusiastic. Gradually, as they drank and ate, tensions and jealousies surfaced - true drama without the usual predictable (though supposedly unpredictable) violence and melodrama, in fact with a deliberate flouting of the rather tired, sedulously-followed rule of ‘Chekhov’s gun’. ‘One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it’, Chekhov famously said, and here we had about five loaded firearms propped up against a sideboard, with an inevitable anticipation of at least one of them being fired, but it never happened. It didn’t need to – Vanishing Point are such a stunningly disciplined, convinced, harmonised, and therefore moving, group of actors, that they transcend the cheap tricks of shock, horror and obscenity to give us real, human theatre.
Jane O’Grady