Set up in 2003, the Oxford Trust Samuel Beckett Prize has been giving experimental theatre makers a leg up for two decades now, with each year’s winner awarded a run at the Barbican’s smaller Pit theatre for what are invariably some extremely wild show ideas.
It would be reductive and probably untrue to say Finn Beames & Company’s Quiet Songs is the strangest winner of the prize I’ve seen, but it’s also undeniable that it has several extremely esoteric elements that kind of need to be discussed upfront.
Firstly, it boasts an unexpectedly major star in the form of Ruth Negga, who hasn’t acted on the English stage in over a decade. Pre-pandemic she had been due to lead a major Young Vic revival of Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan; her last stage outing was opposite Daniel Craig in Macbeth on Broadway; she’s maybe not a full-on megastar but this is a low-key project by her standards.
Clad in a school blazer, and spending much of the show lying on the floor facing away from us in the stygian gloom, she adopts a crepuscular half-whisper as she performs Beames’s eerily poetic, semi-abstract, autobiographical text about a gay teen boy’s struggles at school.
Why a middle-aged woman playing a 13-year-old boy? Well it is very cool to have Ruth Negga in your experimental play, she nails a mood and certainly it would be a mistake to see Quiet Songs as a naturalistic drama, or indeed a drama at all.
Did I mention the swords?
Negga is joined by a very unusual string quartet, four women with cellos, violins… and swords. In the virtual pitch darkness, the musicians seem to less play music than perform a ritual - at first eerily running their bows along the weapons; later daggers. Occasionally droning notes of music are extracted; more often than not it’s an ominous metallic swishing sound that speaks of imminent violence. Augmented by doomy pre-recorded drums, deeper into the show the musicians don blank faced fencing masks and lock bows like weapons.
If you were to simply isolate the words, about a miserable teen poetically discussing their school experience, talking about homophobia in wilfully oblique terms, you might accuse Quiet Songs of being a touch sophomoric, a little on the emo side.
But that would be to disregard 90 percent of what Quiet Songs actually is. Beames has written it, directed it and composed the music and the words are just a facet of this lushly dark rite of a show that exists predominantly as movement and sounds and tableaux and the menacing, glittering symbolism of the swords. It is exquisite stagecraft and dazzling invention and visceral darkness. Maybe I could extrapolate the idea that its formal otherliness reflects the young Beames’ sense of alienation. Or maybe he just really likes swords.
Either is fine and while there are some harder questions I might ask if Quiet Songs were £50 in a big theatre, I can’t stress enough that this entirely singular show is just £18 for an unreserved ticket, and there are currently tickets left for every performance. Even if you end up hating it, you won’t have seen anything quite like it – just as the Beckett Award should be.