History Has No Safe Word ***

The last light of a balmy May evening filters through the beautiful stained-glass windows of St Mary’s Church, lending an atmospheric backdrop to Something Underground’s ambitious solo show History Has No Safe Word.

The premise is hardly straightforward. A once formidable and renowned college professor (Nathan) is now in decline. He suffers from sleep deprivation. While being observed in a clinical trial, he begins to speak in his sleep - but in an ancient language that he seemingly does not know. His over-ambitious master’s student (Callie) stays over to observe and the following day recounts conversations with a citizen of Pompeii (Methe) from 2,000 years ago, spoken through Nathan in his sleep.

Is this a ruse on the part of one of the protagonists, perhaps designed to have an academic paper published? Perhaps suggestive of reincarnation? Or an example of Jung’s theory of collective unconscious?

The sleep-talking conversations appear to grant Callie a window into Methe’s real-time world. She begins to engage with Methe, becoming emotionally entangled with her existence and daily struggles, despite the stark logic that Methe has been dead for two millennia. Callie realises that in Methe’s timeline, Vesuvius is about to erupt, killing everybody in the town. She warns Callie of her imminent mortal danger, in so doing changing Methe’s actions, alluding to the Hawthorne Effect, in which observation changes behaviour. The ethical questions raised cause a rift between Nathan and Callie.

Jonathan Brown’s performance in this challenging solo show is impressive. After a languid opening, he grows into the role of performer and narrator, commanding the stage impressively and compellingly. Despite this, the production does not quite land: at times, the dialogue becomes repetitive and its running time of 140 minutes surely warrants an edit, or even reconstruction.

There are many themes to this production: gender and generational politics, ambition, voyeurism, survival and desire. But perhaps the most striking is that of exploitation, which seems to be just as prevalent in the 21^st century as back in Pompeii.

On one level, this is a somewhat unlikely tale that seems to lean into quantum mechanics; however, at the core of History Has No Safe Word is the timelessness of the human condition.